Luxury for sale: sellers should be patient, buyers can be picky.

• Author: Westby, Tim
• Position: Residential Real Estate: Focus

DURING THE RIP-ROARING 1990s, when the only thing hotter than Utah's economy was the NASDAQ, luxury homes were in high demand. Buyers snapped up high-end homes all over Utah, expecting and often seeing steep increases in the value of those homes in just a few years.

Now, after nearly three years of a queasy stock market and an overall stalled economy, the housing market in Utah is a hit or miss proposition depending on location, location, location.

Real estate agents in second home, retirement and resort communities like St. George and Park City say the high-end market is strong. "It's not a real, real brisk market, but it is steady," says Claudia Ashby with Coldwell Banker Premier in St. George. "Our agents are keeping busy"

Keith El Bakri, with Re/Max First Reality, is even more upbeat about the Washington County market. Last year, he says "was probably our best year in at least the last decade."

After buyers stayed away for most of 2002, Park City-based real estate brokers credit the Olympic afterglow and pent-up demand for a spurt of buying in December that propelled what had been a lackluster market into a solid year overall, with second homes and condos particularly strong. In mid-January Jim Lewis, principal broker with Lewis, Wolcott and Dornbush Real Estate, said the month of December in Park City had been particularly robust. "For our company it's been the strongest market in years."

But ask an agent in Salt Lake County how things are going and you'll likely hear the kind of tales of woe that only two rough years in a row could provide. And the higher the price, the worse the tale. Like the house that cost $6 million to build and sold for $3.5 million last year on the third turnover. Or the Mount Olympus home that cost the original owners $9 million to build and sold late last year for a little more than half that -- a houseful of designer furniture included.

This isn't the worst market real estate veteran Linda Wolcott, also with Lewis, Dornbush and Wolcott, has ever seen (the mid-1980s were much worse, she says). "But in the multimillion-dollar market, sellers need to be prepared to have their homes for sale for two or three years at least," says Wolcott. And five years isn't unusual.

Come down to earth a bit with homes in, say, the $500k and up range, and the market is slightly better -- but only slightly "Over the last year, it's been slowing down," says Richard Lock-wood, principal broker with the Salt Lake City-based Ramsey...