According to the statistics released on Thursday by the San Diego-based real estate tracking firm MDA DataQuick, the month of May saw a jump in the median sale price of San Francisco Bay Area homes, as well as the overall number of homes sold in the area.

DataQuick - which defines the Bay Area as the nine-county region comprising counties of Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, Santa Clara, San Francisco, San Mateo, Solano and Sonoma - said the rise in median price in May marked the second consecutive monthly rise; and the eleventh consecutive monthly increase in terms of overall home sales in California.

DataQuick said that there was a 4 percent increase in median home price in the state to $230,000 in May, vis-à-vis the April figures. Meanwhile, the 39,051 overall number of homes sold in California in May indicated a rise on a year-over-year basis for eleven months in a row - with a turnaround for the better in the sales of $500,000-plus homes, which increased to 17 percent from 15.2 percent in April.

Commenting on the May figures, DataQuick president John Walsh said: "The market has been working its way through the craziness of the 'loans-gone-wild' activity of
2005 to 2007. What we don't know is how the distress from the recession will ultimately play out in the housing market."