Fun with averages

Baltimore has been trying to get people who live in D.C. to move to Baltimore - after all, Baltimore is way cheaper, and the MARC can be convinient. One of the target neighborhoods they have is Resevoir Hill, my hood. They even have a nifty website set up for this. They even have nifty ads with pics of Resevoir Hill.

One thing that struck me as funny was the picture of several nicely restored Resevoir Hill brownstones, with the fact that the average selling price of a resevoir hill house is $182,041.

But not for one of the houses pictured - in fact, a few of the houses near the ones in the picture have sold for around $350,000 plus - and aren't exactly "restored".

Averages are great when you have a pretty even distribution. But the 'hill has lots of outliers - you have homes going for $550 grand but you also have houses going for less than the cost of a Ford Taurus. Since there are a fair number of homes like the second one in Resevoir Hill - shells with no floors, walls, windows, or all those other things people buying houses like - it pulls the average down, and makes using the average useless at best and dishonest at worst.

I don't know if baiting and switching homes on potential residents is a great way to sell the city.