"I can't keep a good home on the market very long," he said.
Urgent Bid
In September, Jason and Rebecca Prone paid $383,000 for a new 3,100-square-foot (290-square-meter) home in Northville, a Detroit suburb, because they couldn't find an existing house in the area chosen for its quality schools.
"If we didn't put in a bid by the time we were outside looking at it, we missed it," said Jason Prone, 34, a transplant from Washington, D.C., who works from home for the U.S. Patent Office.
Demand also has grown for New York City-area condos and for homes in the Boston-to-Washington corridor, said Doug Yearley, chief executive officer of Toll Brothers Inc., which reported that orders for the quarter ended Jan. 31 rose 19 percent and average prices climbed 22 percent to $682,000.
"We're optimistic," Yearley, whose Horsham, Pennsylvania- based company is the largest U.S. luxury-home builder, said in a Feb. 22 interview on Bloomberg Television. "We have orders that are up significantly. We're seeing deposits up. We're seeing traffic up."
'Pockets Of Success'
More people are building new high-end homes around Boston and spending has increased on home improvement, said John Ted Mahoney III, president of Windjammer Construction Corp., a closely held home-construction and remodeling business in Bridgewater, Massachusetts.
"There are pockets of success for the first time in a long time," said Mahoney, who's also president of the Builders Association of Greater Boston.
In Phoenix, prices rose 2.7 percent last year, including a 7 percent increase in the fourth quarter alone, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency index, which measures resale prices of homes with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgages. The turnaround in the Arizona state capital -- where almost 53 percent of homes had negative equity in the fourth quarter, according to CoreLogic -- is carrying over to the new-home market.