Have you tried using the NTILE function. Really designed to do just this type of stuff. Run this after inserting into the data into the #Sales table.

select House_ID, [2007], Ntile(3) over (order by [2007] desc) as '2007 Ranking', [2008], NTILE(3) over (order by [2008] desc) as '2008 Ranking'

from #sales

The ranking numbers here don't match perfectly with yours, but they are close and probably more accurage. Also, the execution plan I saw shows that it should run faster and with a lot less coding. Let me know how it works.

Fraggle