Here’s a little housing watcher game called “The High & The Low,” where we compare the most and least expensive homes sold in a given market.

Most of the time this is just an entertaining way to highlight some home listings that might otherwise go unnoticed (low-priced homes particularly tend to get passed over for coverage), but other times it can grant a little extra regional perspective

Of the 35 MLS-listed homes sold in the Richmond in July (you’ll see why we’re going back to July in a minute), the biggest ticket was 751 3rd Avenue, a four bed, four bath beauty that went for $3.95 million. The most affordable sale was 237 Arguello Blvd #12, a one bed, one bath condo that netted $872,000.

Between these two figures, you get an average price of just over $2.41 million. (Ignoring the other data points in the set is not good math, but let’s play along for simplicity’s sake. The median for all 35 listings is around $1.57 million, for the record.)

For perspective, that means if the Richmond were its own metro area, it would have had a higher average home price for July than any other in California.

If the Richmond were its own county, it would have been the most expensive place to shop for a home in the entire Bay Area; second place for the month would have been San Mateo County, which averaged $2.11 million for a home during the same period.

Even the cheapest Richmond home was worth more than the average for all of Solano and Sonoma counties and the entire LA Metropolitan area as well. It was more than the average for the entire state, as a matter of fact.

All of that is according to the California Association of Realtor’s estimates for California home prices that month. (They haven’t published August figures yet, which is why we’re still looking back to July for these examples.)

If the Richmond were a city, a county, or a region all its own, it would be the hottest market CAR provided figures for. The lower (and, again, admittedly more accurate) $1.57 million median figure would set the Richmond back behind a handful of places, like Santa Clara County–but it’d be a close contest.

Of course, we should remember there are neighborhoods in San Francisco and in other counties where homes are even more in demand than in the Richmond. And we should also remember that metrics like averages or high and low prices are artificial benchmarks that should be taken with a grain of salt.

Still, maybe this humble neighborhood is not so humble after all–if we judge by just how badly people want to live here, that is.