Broker Says Exclusion of Attached Homes Skews Sales Data

SANTA ANA —  Richard Poucher has been conducting a lonely campaign for more than five years now to persuade the California Assn. of Realtors--of which he is a lifetime member--to include attached homes in its monthly housing sales data in order to give people a more realistic picture of the state’s housing prices.

The state group doesn’t include lower-priced attached homes in its calculations because it so far has not been able to design a computer program that would enable it to tally attached home sales data accurately, a spokeswoman said.

But through Poucher’s efforts, figures are available for Orange County that include attached sales and result in significantly lower home prices than reflected in the official state and national realty association reports.

Poucher is a statistician and real estate broker who tracks the numbers for the East Orange County Assn. of Realtors using sales reported to multiple listing services by realtors in each of the county’s 11 trade associations.

For example, the state association reported a $218,200 median price in April for resale detached homes in Orange County, but Poucher’s median of $192,100 for all types of resale homes in the county was nearly 12% lower.