Notwithstanding the fact that the real estate market remains soft, there seems to be one segment of the market where homes are selling faster:
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. Even as foreclosures keep rising and overall sales continue to plummet, more expensive homes have staged a bit of a comeback in recent months. They�re spending less time languishing on the market than others, and their prices appear to be holding up better.
There are several reasons for this, of course. Most importantly, though, these homes cater to a segment of society that is unlikely to be hurting financially and unlikely to be troubled by the problems in the sub-prime mortgage industry. Also, homes like these tend to become status symbols and are arguably not subject to the same supply and demand forces that the typical home has to deal with.
