REAL ESTATE

For Better or Worse: We get numbers.

This week, the mail brought reports of August home sales from the California Assn. of Realtors and TRW-Redi Property Data.

CAR, which relies on data supplied by various realty boards, said single-family home resales in Orange County dropped 6% from August, 1990. The median price--half sold for more, half for less--of those resale homes was $241,300, up less than 1% from $239,650 a year earlier.

TRW-Redi, which counts deeds that are recorded with the county--meaning the actual sales agreements were made a month or so earlier--said sales of new homes in the county dropped 35% from August, 1990.

But resales were up 1% from a year earlier. (TRW counts attached as well as detached homes in its resale category, while the CAR report includes only detached homes.)

TRW, which uses the average rather than the median, said the average new home in Orange County sold for $260,757 in August, up 2.1% from a year earlier, while the average resale home went for $245,914, down 4.5% from August, 1990.

So it appears that August wasn’t a very good month for resales, if you go by the CAR report, but was an all-right month based on the TRW report.

And while TRW said new homes sales plunged, a lot of that is because builders are holding new products off the market as they try to sell their supplies of built-but-unsold homes. There just aren’t as many new homes available for sale as last year. So August probably wasn’t all that terrible in the new home market, either.