For Sunday, I picked five recently sold homes and researched their sales history to get a snapshot of what's going on in the local market.

A reader e-mailed me this morning to express her sadness over the absence of any east side homes. To all on the east side: I don't hate you. Really.

I considered picking homes from each quadrant of the city. But in the end, I decided I wanted to be as neutral as possible picking the homes. Why? Because, yes, I wanted to bring the price fluctuations of individual homes into focus. But I also wanted to give a little bit of an idea of what's selling, and where.

I used the Excel software's random number generator to assign numbers to all the houses sold the first week of February. Then I sorted and picked the top five. Turns out, I got a selection of northwest and southwest homes.

While five is hardly a scientific sample, the results turned out to be pretty representative of the sales that week. West side sales outpaced east side sales, and more than half of the homes' sellers were banks (in other words, lots of sales of foreclosure homes).

That said, anybody got a sense of what's selling on the east side? Are houses in your neighborhood selling? And what kind of prices are they getting compared with, say, 2005?

-Vanessa Gregory, staff writer (and northeast resident)