Luxury condos still hot sellers

Tony Illia writes:

Okay, maybe the housing market has seen better days. But luxury condos are still hot sellers commanding big buck sale prices, reports Restrepo Consulting Group, a Las Vegas-based economic research firm.

"The luxury condo market saw a 48 percent increase in units sold in the third quarter," said John Restrepo, principal of Restrepo Consulting Group. "Although median sale prices slipped by 17 percent, primarily due to smaller unit sizes, the price per square foot increased by nearly 5 percent."

There have been 89 luxury condos sold year-to-date with a median price of $860,000, or $502 per square foot, Restrepo reports. Condos this year averaged 1,712 square feet in size and spent roughly 92 days on the market. Single-family homes, by contrast, saw a 38.2 percent sales drop this year despite a 4.9 percent price decrease. Condos similarly dropped prices by an average of 16.9 percent as opposed to 2006. But last year's units were 20.8 percent larger, averaging 1,161 square feet in size. Sale prices, as a result, are 4.9 percent higher in 2007 when compared on a square footage basis.