A survey by Coldwell Banker Real Estate Corp. said the average price for four-bedroom, 2 1/2-bathroom homes in Honolulu is down 7.6 percent this year from last year — outpacing an overall 4.4 percent collective decline for 315 U.S. markets sampled.

Coldwell said the average price for the homes, which are roughly 2,200 square feet, was $780,000 in Honolulu, down from $843,750 a year ago.

Despite the drop, Honolulu's average price remained in the top 10 percent of the survey.

The report attempts to provide a "snapshot" of comparative midyear home prices appealing largely to middle management executives around the country. But local real estate experts caution that the survey's methodology and limited sample reduce the usefulness of the report as an assessment of the market.

Coldwell's survey compares similar size homes, but doesn't factor lot size, which tends to account for much more of the price of Hawai'i homes than in most other markets. That means "comparable" homes in Mainland markets may come with acres of land compared with one on a 5,000-square-foot lot in Honolulu.

Also, using an average rather than median price can skew prices in markets with only one very high or low price among few sales. The median, a point at which half the sales are for more and half for less, is swayed less by outlying sales figures.

Coldwell conducts its home price comparison annually, but the list of cities surveyed varies from year to year.

A National Association of Realtors report said the median price for all single-family homes sold in the second quarter in Honolulu was $636,000, down 4.4 percent from $665,000 in the same quarter last year. The average decline for about 150 major metropolitan areas was 7.6 percent to $206,500 from $223,500 in the same period.

The NAR study put Honolulu's median at third highest, behind $755,000 for San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, Calif., where the median dropped 13 percent from a year earlier, and $684,900 for San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, Calif., where the median was down 19 percent.

In the Coldwell report, La Jolla, Calif., had the highest average price at $1.84 million for the 2,200-square-foot homes. Other markets with average prices higher than Honolulu included Chicago, Oakland and Boston. The average price in Kihei, Maui, was $934,950 and was 16th most expensive.

Honolulu's average price of $780,000 was 31st most expensive, just below Washington, D.C., at $785,000, and just above Irvine, Calif., at $773,750. The lowest average price was in Sioux City, Iowa, at $133,459. The average was $403,738.

The Coldwell survey also sampled several foreign countries and calculated comparable home price averages that included $2.45 million in Dubai and $96,750 in Quito, Ecuador.