But home sellers know better.

Prices in many individual neighborhoods have declined considerably more than what the overall numbers indicate.

That contention was supported yesterday by the release of Prudential Locations Inc.'s quarterly newsletter, Hawaii Real Estate Indicators.

Mike Sklarz, Prudential's research director, compared median resale prices - the standard industry gauge - of single-family homes with square-footage prices to show that sellers today typically are getting much less than they did six years ago, the market's peak.

Sklarz noted that Oahu's median house price - the level at which half the homes sold for below, half above - has remained relatively flat since 1990.

"At the same time, the experience of both home sellers and brokers is that prices have really declined in many of these same neighborhoods," he wrote. "There is a way to reconcile these differences. The key issue is how much house the buyer is getting for that same price."

The answer: a lot more.

Sklarz picked two neighborhoods - Moanalua Valley and upper Makikilo - to illustrate his point.

In Moanalua, the price paid per square foot of living space for an average single-family home has plunged 41 percent since 1991, from $285 to $167, according to Prudential. Yet the median is off only 2 percent, from $435,000 to $425,000.

In upper Makakilo, the square-footage price fell nearly 21 percent, while the median declined only 4.6 percent.

Sklarz said in an interview that the two areas are fairly representative of what has happened in most Oahu neighborhoods.

He said he wasn't suggesting that Moanalua prices are off 41 percent, but they're down much more than the median would indicate. The median doesn't take into account the size of the houses sold, a major driver of pricing, Sklarz said.

A more accurate indicator would be to adjust prices to account for size, amenities and other factors - a process at least one national trade group has adopted.

West Oahu Realty principal broker Guy Tamashiro agreed that median numbers can be deceiving. What he sees happening in the market and what the median statistics suggest - only a small drop in pricing - are two different things, he said.

"This market is the worst I've seen in the past 20 years," Tamashiro said.