Based on the official housing statistics, you might have guessed that the sellers would have made out just fine, despite talk of a real estate slump. According to one widely followed real estate index – tabulated by the government agency that regulates Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – the average house in Naples sold for 20 percent more this summer than it would have a year earlier.

But that wasn't what happened at the auction. If you were there, you could have been excused for thinking that the real estate market was crashing.

One three-bedroom ranch house with a pool sold for $671,000. In 2005, the same house had sold for $809,000. Another house, just steps from Naples Bay, sold for $880,000 at the auction. Less than a year earlier, it had cost $1.35 million. On average, the houses that changed hands at the auction had fallen about 25 percent in value since 2005, according to Thomas Lawler, a real estate consultant who analyzed the auction's results.

Now, Naples is not a typical housing market. House prices nearly tripled in the first half of this decade, and speculators, who are more likely than residents to sell a house in a panic, flooded into the area in recent years. But with that said, Naples is not as unusual as you may think.

The truth is that the official numbers on house prices – the last refuge of soothing information about the real estate market on the coasts – are wrong. Depending on which set you look at, you'll see that prices have either continued to rise, albeit modestly, or have fallen slightly over the last year. But the statistics have a number of flaws, perhaps the biggest being that they are based only on homes that have actually sold. They overlook all those homes that have been languishing on the market for months getting offers that their owners have not been willing to accept.

In reality, homes across much of Florida, California and the Northeast are worth a lot less than they were a year ago. The auction in Naples may have exaggerated the downturn in the market there, but not by much. Tom Doyle, a Naples real estate agent, estimated that a typical house there, sold in the normal way, would go for about 20 percent less than it did last fall.

Prices have fallen about 10 to 15 percent since the middle of 2005, estimated Chobee Hoy, who owns a real estate brokerage firm in Brookline, Mass.The government, meanwhile, says the average price rose 1 percent from last summer to this summer. But here's all you need to know about how well the government tracks the Boston market: The index excludes any mortgage larger than $417,000.)

Since March, Hoy's brokerage has been listing a house in Brookline that cost $995,000 when it last sold, in the summer of 2004. Hoy expects it to sell this time for less than $900,000.

In New York City, where co-op boards generally bar the door to absentee speculators and creative mortgages, prices seem to have slid a bit in the last few months, but only to roughly their 2005 leve
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