About 120 homes sold for at least $1 million in the Baltimore metro area during the first half of this year. Most expensive: $3.9 million in Baltimore County. (The house pictured above, part of the Sun's "top properties" photo gallery, sold for $1.37 million in Edgewater this spring.)

How does that compare with earlier days, I wondered? So I checked. One of the nice things about swimming in numbers -- being able to satisfy your curiosity.

Pricey sales are actually up quite a bit from the first half of 2009, when 83 homes sold in that high-end category, according to Metropolitan Regional Information Systems data.

But they're down a lot compared with the first half of 2005 -- which probably won't surprise you all, since that was the height of the bubble. More than 230 homes sold for at least $1 million during those six months, nearly twice as many as in the first half of this year. And the top of the top was pricier, too: $5.2 million for digs in Anne Arundel.

That doesn't mean there's nothing really pricey up for sale at the moment in Maryland. There's this "lodge," for instance.

And lots of people are hoping their homes will end up in the $1 million sales club -- 610 as of October in the Baltimore metro area. Of those, 10 have asking prices of $5 million or more.

The $1 million-plus crowd is just one price category, so these stats don't fully answer reader Chappy10's question about how sales have changed in the various ranges in the last several years. But it was the quickest and easiest: a lot less to tally than other prices. I do plan to do a full analysis when time allows, Chappy10.