sorting output - question about ORDER by

[Michael Camp]

I've got a data table named "admin" which stores real esate properties and I want it to pull waterfront properties, then display by price, sorted ASC

$sql="SELECT * FROM admin WHERE cat='waterfront' ORDER BY price ASC";

prices range from 99,000 to 1,575,000

but instead of recognizing 99,000 as lower than the one-million number, it shows the 1,575,000 first - obviously sorting by "1-9," regardless of the real number value.

Is there a better way to get it to sort numbers from smallest to largest?

thanks in advance, ya'all.
mc