What money doesn't buy: Luxury home market stalls
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This luxury home in Boca Raton, Fla. is on the auction block after failing to sell for $21.9 million June 23, 2009. Luxury home owners are becoming trapped by many of the same issues facing their less affluent counterparts in the languishing housing market.
In the affluent village of Bronxville, N.Y., where residents of million-dollar homes have an easy half-hour commute into Manhattan, selling a house has become a whole lot harder.
Larry Brocchini put his four-bedroom Colonial on the market in late May, with a price tag of $969,000. He and his wife, who want to move closer to their son's private school, have hosted open houses and showed the home by private appointment about 10 times, but they have yet to receive a bid.
The pool of potential buyers looking to escape crowds and crowded schools of Manhattan is also having trouble selling their apartments and co-ops. In the Big Apple, the median sales price for an apartment priced in the top 10% of the market fell as much as 26% in the second quarter and the number of sales were cut in half from the year-ago period, data last week showed.
