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 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.
This split in the market helps explain why the sales of Manhattan apartments, some of the priciest homes in the country, have remained fairly strong.
The national trend has gone largely unnoticed, though, because neither the federal government nor the National Association of Realtors report statistics for different price segments.
But after just about every home sale, documents must be filed with a local government office. A research firm called DataQuick Information Systems gathers these records, and a New York Times analysis of them shows that the story of today’s real estate market is really two different stories.
In the Boston area, for instance, the number of homes selling for at least $1 million plummeted to 619 in the first five months of 2006, from 773 in the period in 2005, according to DataQuick.
But the number jumped to 711 in the first five months of this year.
In the New York region, sales at the top end – that is, homes in the most expensive 5 percent of the market – have also been rising, while they have been falling in the middle and bottom of the market. The same is true in the San Jose, Calif.; Seattle; Denver; and Houston areas. In San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Miami, high-end sales are down but not by nearly as much as sales in other price segments.