wp_query order by title

I have post titles which begin with a price, eg: $199,900 – 123 Street. I am using the code below, and I’m unable to get the order by title ascending to work properly. Any suggestions please.

<?php
$paged = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1;
$args = array(
 'cat' =>21,
 'posts_per_page' => 999999,
 'paged' => $paged,
 'orderby' => 'title',
 'order' => 'ASC',
 );
$the_query = new WP_Query($args);
?>
<div id="listings">

<?php if ($the_query->have_posts()) : ?>

<?php while ($the_query->have_posts()): $the_query->the_post(); ?>
        <div <?php post_class() ?> id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">
            <div class="title1 active_listing">
                <?php
                if (in_category('6')) {
                the_title();
                } else {
                ?>

                <a href="https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/30491/<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark"><?php the_title(); ?></a>
                <?php
                }
                ?>
            </div>

                <div class="alignleft thumb"><?php the_post_thumbnail('thumbnail'); ?>
<br />
</div>
        <div class="content"><?php the_excerpt(); ?> </div>

                <?php
                if (in_category('6')) {
                ?>
<br />
                <?php
                } else {
                ?>
 <a href="https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/30491/<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark"> View Details</a>
 <br />
                <?php
                }
                ?>

        </div>

    <?php endwhile; wp_reset_postdata();?>

<?php else : ?>

    <h2 class="center">Not Found</h2>
    <p class="center">Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn't here.</p>
    <?php get_search_form(); ?>

<?php endif; ?>

</div>

If you’re trying to get them to order by ascending price, the problem is that ordering by title is a string comparison, not numeric. A solution would be to put the price in a custom field and orderby your custom field rather than title. You would add a meta_key param with the name of your meta key, and orderby meta_value_num. See WP_Query in Codex for more info.

Also- if you want all posts returned (which I assume is what you’re trying to do with setting it to such a high number), you can set posts_per_page to -1 instead and it will remove the LIMIT clause from the query.