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Another month has gone by with the real estate market registering little sign of an upswing.

The median, or middle, price for homes sold in April dropped to $195,000, the lowest it has been since March 2005, according to a sales report released Monday by the Tucson Association of Realtors Multiple Listing Service. That was down 2.5 percent from March and 13.3 percent from the same month last year.

The average price also dropped about 2 percent from last month and 8.9 percent from a year ago to $253,729. The number of homes sold last month totaled 973, up 8.1 percent from March but down 26.2 percent from April 2007.

Undoubtedly, some people in the real estate industry may insist that the market is improving, while some would-be buyers continue to wait on the sidelines for prices to drop further.

But down market or not, one real estate guru insists that falling prices are no cause for depression. More than 200 Coldwell Banker agents turned out for a three-day seminar last week given by former independent New Jersey broker Jay Schweppe, now a training consultant for Coldwell Banker parent NRT. Schweppe, who describes his methods as "a paradigm shift" and "a new way of thinking," did not paint the market in glowing terms.

It's "scary," he said during the seminar on May 5. "Things are changing too fast, and we don't know what those changes are going to be."

Schweppe said agents have to pay attention to where the market is going — up or down — and price properties accordingly. The best way to do that, he said, is by looking at the number of listings on the market and remembering some basic economic principles.

"When inventories grow, prices go down," he said in an interview. "When inventories go down, prices go up."

Active listings in Tucson are falling, but not quickly. In April, listings stood at 8,808, down about 2.4 percent from March and down 15.2 percent from a record 10,387 last year.

In formerly hot real estate markets such as Arizona, California and Florida, inventory levels still have a long way to drop before prices start to go up, possibly as much as 70 percent, Schweppe said.

Rosey Koberlein, CEO of Long Realty, said she believes the market is improving, based on the falling number of active listings and the rising number of pending contracts, or sales that are yet to close.

Pending contracts rose to 1,547, up 9.7 percent from March and 27.1 percent from last year, according to the Realtors sales report. For the past year, however, year-over-year pending sales increases have not resulted in higher year-over-year sales, according to Realtors statistics.

"If you take a look at the data, we're going sideways here, and we've hit the bottom," Koberlein said. "At some point, it's going to pick back up."

Koberlein led a public-information session held last month by Long titled "MythBusters: Designed to Bust the Myth of Buying and Selling a Home in Tucson." Then, she told buyers that the market varies considerably depending on the area.

"You can't compare Tucson to the rest of the nation, and you can't compare areas within Tucson to the general marketplace," she said in an interview.

But in the areas that are suffering, she said, "agents owe it to our consumers to be very clear, direct and be able to talk about the market statistics and give very honest evaluation."