This is called a mix shift and it is the single most common misreading of neighbourhood statistics. North Park is a small older neighbourhood north of downtown near the river, and it may record only a handful of residential sales in a month. Swap two small character homes for two larger renovated ones and the median jumps sharply without a single owner's property becoming worth more.
Price per square foot has its own weakness, which is why the two figures disagree so often. Land, garage, lot width, basement development and mechanical condition are not measured in square feet, and the cost of a kitchen does not scale with floor area. Small homes routinely show a higher rate per foot than large ones in the same block, so a month with bigger sales pulls the average rate down automatically.
The figure with the fewest of these problems is the benchmark, currently $444,700 for Saskatoon, because it prices a constant typical home over time instead of whatever happened to trade. Even so, no city wide series describes a specific North Park house. Joel Dyck's hand-reviewed valuation prices the actual property, including the renovations that never appeared in a permit file and therefore never entered any of these statistics.