Even though the median price for new homes nationwide fell by the largest amount in 35 years last month, homes in the Pittsburgh region continued to show mild appreciation.

The Commerce Department reported yesterday that in September, the median price for new homes fell to $217,100, a 9.7 drop from the year-ago price of $240,400. That was the largest year-to-year decline since December 1970, when prices fell by 11.2 percent. The rate of sales also fell, to 1.08 million homes annually from 1.25 million.

Richard Moody, vice president and senior economist for PNC Financial Services Group, sees no cause for alarm in the Commerce Department's news.

"It's really a pretty meaningless number," he said, because "there is no national housing market. What we have are local housing markets."

And among those local housing markets, Pittsburgh appears safe from the much-feared housing collapse.

"We didn't see the really rapid price growth, so our market is not due a correction to the extent that you have in some of the other markets," Mr. Moody said. "Since we were more stable on the upside, it follows that we're going to be more stable on the downside as well."

Figures published by West Penn Multi-List, which tracks sales brokered by Realtors in Western Pennsylvania, bear him out. The average price of a home sold through September of this year in the seven-county metropolitan area is $139,145, a 3.38 percent increase over the $134,594 average for the first nine months of last year. The number of sales, meanwhile, is virtually unchanged -- 30,637 compared with 30,599 last year.

Perhaps the best illustration of the difference between the national figures and Pittsburgh's performance as a housing market is this: The median price that represents such a dramatic drop nationally, $217,100, is higher than the highest average price among the metro area's seven counties -- Butler County's $215,196, which is a 6.11 percent increase over the county's year-ago average.