While America’s apartment market continues to boom as homeownership rates fall in America, the owner occupied portion of the housing market continues to recovery slowly. One exception to this is the market for newly constructed luxury homes. The expanding wealth of the already rich is impacting the demand for expensive new construction.
According to Metrostudy, a research company that focuses on residential demand and construction, luxury builder Toll Brothers sold five hundred eighty-five homes across the nation priced at one million dollars or more last year. That was nearly three times the number it sold just two years previously. Homebuilder D.R. Horton sold only five homes for one million or more in two thousand and twelve. Last year, it sold one hundred and forty-five.
As reported by writer Dionne Searcey, this pattern is apparent among other homebuilders as well. Consequently, even as existing home sales prices have been rising quite slowly, prices for new homes are now rising briskly. In September 2005, the average price gap between new and existing homes was about thirty two thousand dollars. Today, it is around one hundred and twenty-two thousand dollars.
