Buffalo Niagara’s housing market is mired in fog again, as record-keeping problems for real estate agents have led to conflicting statistics about the strength of local home sales.

The Buffalo Niagara Association of Realtors said Monday that pending home sales for the region in January were up 12 percent from the same month a year ago, to 565 from 503. Even more, sales that have been agreed to but not closed rose 34 percent from December.

But the association can’t say how many homes have actually closed, because of an ongoing discrepancy in their records that’s resulting in abnormally low figures.

Instead, they’re just not saying at all. “I’d rather have no numbers than bad numbers,” said John Leonardi, executive vice president and CEO of the trade group.

The BNAR, which publishes monthly sales and price figures for Erie and Niagara counties, withheld the closed sales information from the regular report the group issued Monday. That’s the second time in recent months it has done so, citing suspected inaccuracies in the numbers.

The BNAR may have good reason to be concerned. According to sales numbers obtained by The Buffalo News, completed sales were down 12 percent, to 411 in January 2010 from 465 in January 2009.

And closed sales fell a whopping 40 percent from December’s tally of 688.

Pending sales represent a good measurement of what’s to come in the next 60 days, as home purchases in New York State typically take two months to complete. As such, they reflect recently signed contracts and shopping by homebuyers.

But those agreements can also fall through or be delayed. So closed transactions traditionally are the more widely watched barometer of actual home sales, and are used to gauge the strength of the housing market both locally and nationally.

However, the BNAR has been struggling for months to get its arms around statistical problems that are plaguing the closed report. Officials cited ongoing data-collection problems stemming from a merger last year of the multiple listing services in Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse.

Under the BNAR’s computer system, pending sales were automatically converted to closed after 60 days, with no further action needed by the agents.

But agents in Rochester and Syracuse have always had to log into their listing service to mark a transaction as closed. And that’s the method that was adopted for the combined entity, creating a cultural change for the BNAR agents that Leonardi said hasn’t been accepted.

As a result, he said there are more than 400 transactions that are still pending after 60 days, more than half of which he said should probably have closed by now.

“The numbers aren’t accurate, what’s in the system,” Leonardi said. “Agents are not going back in the system and reporting them as closed. It’s very frustrating. I don’t know what else to do.”

Meanwhile, Leonardi said the federal tax credits of up to $8,000 for first-time homebuyers and up to $6,500 for existing homeowners are still driving housing activity. But he noted that homebuyers must have properties under contract by April 30 to qualify.

“It’s the tax credit and the affordability of homes in our market,” Leonardi said. “I’m hopeful that over the next 90 days, it’ll continue . . . The true litmus test will be what happens after April 30.”

The BNAR said the average price of closed sales rose 7 percent from a year ago but fell 1 percent from December, to $126,584. The median price for completed deals — half are higher, half are lower — soared 14 percent from January 2009 and 5 percent from December, to $110,000. That’s the highest January median in at least 12 years.

The total dollar volume of sales fell 7 percent from a year ago, to $51 million, and plummeted 42 percent from December, to $87.7 million. That’s the lowest January in at least a decade, and the lowest of any month since December 2002.

Inventory also fell, as total active listings in the system dropped 2 percent to 4,934, while new listings fell 8 percent to 1,098.