This is one of those weeks when home-sales reports make my head spin around. Three reports came out Monday; one, yesterday; and one, today. That I know of. There are probably more I don't know about. I'm sure some of you can keep them straight, but for the rest of you -- and mostly me -- I'll recap and give you a little insight about each report.

Released Monday:

-- National Association of Realtors reported existing-home sales. This is one of those reports that means little to our market. The NAR doesn't break out data for our area because the Northwest Multiple Listing Service, which tracks our sales, isn't affiliated with the national organization. And our MLS, which releases its data for each month early the following month, doesn't separate sales of new and existing homes. In other words, this report tell us nothing about the Seattle-area market. We combined the AP story about this report with one about the next report. See the AP story here.

-- The Associated Press-Re/Max Monthly Housing Report addressed October home sales. I actually never see this report, just the Associated Press stories about it. (If you know where to find it, please let me know because I'd love to get my hands on it.) This report covers sales of new and existing homes nationwide and by region. It bothers me because the data for our region, the West, is heavily skewed by ridiculously high foreclosure rates and plummeting prices in California, Nevada and Arizona. In other words, although we run the AP coverage of the report (see Tuesday's here), I get neither excited nor hot and bothered about it. When I see a Seattle area or even Washington state breakdown, I'll jump up and down.

-- Real Trends reported its October home-sales numbers (new and resales). This report also looked at the nation as a whole and at several regions. Nothing more detailed (I called to ask), so -- again -- not particularly helpful in individual markets. It reported changes in average, not median, prices, which means that unless extreme highs and lows are thrown out, the price data can be easily skewed. This one we didn't write about, and no wire services we use covered it, either. Here are the first two paragraphs of the Real Trends news release:

Home sales decreased 4.8 percent nationwide in October 2008 over October 2007 in what real-estate information firm Real Trends calls a "sloppy bottom" -- results that vary significantly from one month to the next.

The strongest region was the West where home sales increased 33.3 percent from October 2007. The hardest-hit regions were the Northeast, which had held up better throughout the downturn that started in July 2005, where unit sales decreased 16.8 percent, and the South, which saw unit sales decrease by 17.1 percent from the same month a year ago.

Released Tuesday:

-- The biggie, which people in the industry seem to either love or hate (I'm not a big fan), was the Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller 10- and 20-city home-price indexes. The Seattle metro area is in the 20-city index, so we watch that one. It looks at the changes in price over time of the same homes, factoring out significant changes that would skew the price change. Elizabeth Rhodes wrote a story about this report.

Released today:

-- The U.S. Commerce Department released its report on new-home sales for October.

Stay tuned. Next week, the Northwest Multiple Listing Service releases it's November home-sales data. And while that data leaves out any sale not reported to the MLS, it's the best, most complete look we have for our market on a monthly basis.