Can this be right?

I’m catching up on my reading, and I just looked at the recent Census Bureau numbers on new residential sales. Can this be right? The median new home price in December, 2008 was $223,200. The median price in January was $201,100. That’s a drop of 10%!

An update: No surprise, but Dean Baker at Beat the Press already remarked on this. He says:

This is a truly incredible rate of price decline. While the data is erratic, even if the decline was only half this large, a 5 percent single month decline in house prices is enormous. This suggests that house prices are in a free fall….. One should be always careful about making too much of a single month’s data, but it is worth noting that this is the most current series on housing prices…..