how to make the median meaningful

Just read this about Perth:
http://www.perthnow.com.au/real-estate/perth-median-house-prices-at-record-high/story-e6frg3mu-1225827192111

Like the bloke says, the increase in median is most likely (certainly?) due to the type of sales (less proportion of FHB's) rather than increases in house values.

With all the data that must be available somewhere, surely there must be some way to correct for this or at least to show complimentary information which can help assess what house prices overall have actually done? The median is too crude a measurement to have much significance.

Just some ideas, but what would be interesting is perhaps a map of the individual sales used in the calculation for each month (to see if the sales are suddenly more biased towards "good" areas).

Or, if another figure was provided which took into account the spread of sales by suburb. Maybe something like the average of (individual sale price/suburb median) for all sales in the median calculation. Then, if this figure >1 indicates overall price increase of housing in that market while <1 indicates a decrease (even though the overall median may have increased).

The above could be refined even further to perform the calculation for different types of houses (e.g. 3 x 1?s, 4 x 2?s, units etc).

I appreciate any calculation will be open to mis-representation but it just seems that the overall median is so open to it that it?s all but useless.

Just thinking out loud....