What is the median price of a single-family home in California?

How to get close to this number

Anchor on the national median and apply a multiple. The explanation gives it: more than double the country as a whole, and the national median for an existing home sits somewhere in the low four hundreds of thousands. Doubling that gives the answer.

The cause in the explanation is a supply story rather than a demand one: the state has permitted far fewer homes per new resident than comparable states for forty years. A price premium sustained over decades is almost always a permitting story, because demand differences equalise through migration and supply differences do not.

The internal spread is as wide as the national gap: the Bay Area median runs well over a million against a state median of under nine hundred thousand. A state median across that range describes no local market, which is the same problem the Spanish housing question on this site has at national scale.