Real Estate Market Trends: Luxury Housing is on the Rise

Luxury properties are once again one of the hottest real estate market trends, as London, New York and Los Angeles report a burgeoning luxury housing market.

Christies International Real Estate released its second annual Luxury Residential Property Market report, looking at the market in 10 of the world’s major markets – Cote d’Azur, Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Paris, San Francisco, Sydney and Toronto. Those markets were compared against each other in terms of sales price, prices per square foot, percentage of non-local and international buyers, and the number of luxury listings per population.

London was rated No. 1 based on its top sale of a property for $101.5 million, and it also had the top per square foot sales average of $4,683. New York and Los Angeles were second and third, respectively, with a significant growth in luxury sales volume.

“With more millionaires and billionaires in the world than ever before, pent-up demand and increasing consumer confidence, luxury real estate sales surged in 2013 around the world,’’ said Christies International Real estate CEO Bonnie Stone Sellers. “Strong momentum in the global international luxury housing market was led by cities such as San Francisco, New York and London, which saw year-over-year increases of 62 percent, 22 percent and 20 percent respectively, in the total number of $1 million property sales.”

SEE: Luxury Spending is on the Rise

According to Spectrem’s Millionaire Corner Affluent Market Insights report for 2014, the number of Millionaire households in the U.S. has reached a record of over 9 million. There are 132,000 households with a net worth over $25 million.

The Christie report said Hong Kong was the fourth-most active market despite new government regulations curtailing large property sales.

Other major markets outside of the top 10 that Christie studied the real estate market trends for luxury properties included Rio de Janeiro and Singapore as well as low-population markets with significant luxury properties such as La Jolla, Calif.; Monte Carlo, Monaco and Sarasota, Fla.