The past few days witnessed several mixed home sales reports. While existing home sales inched down a bit, new home sales were up. But one section of the pie stood glaring - the luxury home sales sector.
According to RealtyTrac, the property intelligence firm, luxury homes - those priced above $200,000 - took up the larger part of the home sales chunk increasing 10 percent on a year over year basis.
Home sales of units priced between $500,000 and $1 million spiked 18 percent in the past 12 months, while that of units asking $1 million and above grew 38 percent over the same period. On the whole, the share of sales of houses priced over $500,000 went up 23 percent from a year ago.
"Higher-end properties are taking up a bigger share of a smaller home sales pie, boosting the median home price nationwide higher even as home price appreciation slows to single digits in many of last year's red-hot local housing markets," Daren Blomquist, vice president at RealtyTrac, said in a statement.
The report also found that certain areas were drawing in more wealthy investors like Seattle.
"In August, homes priced above $2 million saw a 38 percent increase in sales compared to a year ago. I attribute this to Seattle's economic boom, which is attracting an increasing number of high-paying, executive-level professionals as well as international interest from buyers who are competing for multi-million dollar homes." OB Jacobi, president of Windermere Real Estate, added in the statement.
Earlier this month, a report by Realtor.com found that luxury homes have been selling 30 percent faster than average medium-priced homes. Homes listed over $30 million sat for just 130 days on the market when compared to the 180 days for homes priced under that range.
A May report by the property firm Redfin showed that luxury home sales surged 21.1 percent since January 2014 and 35.7 percent since a year ago.
"It's the investor and the wealthy individual that's keeping the market alive," Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics, told The New Zealand Herald in an earlier interview.
"The wealthy buyers in particular are fully engaged now. The stock market is up and times are good for them," he added.
