Released: July 11, 2007

High end housing market surviving slump

Source: David Leonhardt, New York Times (Free Registration)

Given that the real estate market is supposed to be in free fall, some strange things have been happening recently in Mill Valley.

It is one of the expensive suburbs of San Francisco just over the Golden Gate Bridge, and much of the housing market there seems to be doing just fine. One three-bedroom house sold for $1.4 million last month without ever being officially put on the market. The seller accepted a pre-emptive bid — $20,000 above the asking price — from somebody who had heard that the house was about to be listed for sale.

“The homes that are having a hard time selling are the average-priced homes,” said Vanessa Justice, a real estate agent with Pacific Union GMAC in the Bay Area, where the median house price is about $750,000. For upper-end homes, she said, “it’s actually pretty crazy right now.”

It has been a while since real estate agents used the word “crazy” in a positive way, but Ms. Justice is onto something here: the high end of the market is surviving the slump much better than any other segment. 

Read Full Article: High end housing market surviving slump