Mean vs. Median for Income and Home Prices
Income and home-price data are typically right-skewed — a relatively small number of very high earners or very expensive homes pull the mean noticeably above the value that a typical person or property actually represents — which is why the median is the standard, more representative statistic reported for both, since it reflects the actual middle of the distribution regardless of how extreme the high end gets.
This is a specific, well-known real-world case of the general outlier-sensitivity issue that affects the mean.
Why these datasets are right-skewed
Both income and home prices have a natural floor near zero but effectively no upper limit, which structurally skews the distribution — a modest number of very high earners or very high-priced homes can pull the mean up substantially, while there's no symmetric equivalent on the low end to balance it out.
What this means when comparing statistics
When comparing your own income or a home price against a published statistic, check whether it's reported as a mean or a median — comparing your number against a mean in a right-skewed dataset can make you appear further below "average" than you actually are relative to most people or properties in that group.