*Big goof on home sales

Well, it sure looks that way. The Business Journal is reporting this week that 496,512 homes were sold in L.A. County last year. Sound a bit high? It's more like 98,975, according to Dataquick, which provides housing data for the LAT and most other news organizations. Dataquick's final numbers for 2006 should be out in a day or two. The Business Journal numbers are provided by HomeData Corp., a Melville, New York-based company that tracks housing prices nationwide. Some tweaking might be in order.

*Update: The Business Journal is now saying that there were 82,690 resales in 2006, a 21.8 percent decline from a year earlier. Also, the sales numbers for Malibu - the ones that I used in a Tuesday post and on KPCC - were out of whack too. There were 141 homes sold in 2006, down from 309 a year earlier (the paper initially reported that 846 homes were sold in '06).