Langley Realtor, Russell Dudar

Those three columns measure different things and they do not agree. The benchmark is the board's index price for a typical home of that type. The median is the middle sale that month. The average is every sale added up and divided by the count. Langley detached ran $148,100 between the benchmark and the median in October, so a price quoted without saying which of the three it is tells you very little.

Inventory matters as much as price. Langley recorded 59 detached sales in October against 434 active detached listings, about one sale for every seven homes on the market. Townhouses were close to one in three, 76 sales against 260 listings, and condos about one in seven, 60 sales against 404 listings. Townhouses are by far the tightest of the three segments here, and the only one where sales were up on a year ago.

Over five years the Langley townhouse index is up 6.0%, the largest five-year townhouse gain of the eight Fraser Valley communities the board indexes. Condos are up 0.5% over the same five years and detached is down 7.2%. Over twelve months all three are lower, which is what the last column above shows.