Marketing luxury homes: more work, more time needed.

• Author: White, Rindi
• Position: REAL ESTATE

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Everyone has a checklist of things they want in their dream home: enough bedrooms and bathrooms to satisfy the needs of family and guests; a welcoming entryway; quality flooring, whether it be fresh carpeting or a hard surface; a good location near work and schools; and a yard that reflects needs and lifestyle.

Does that change when the buying budget is near or above $1 million? Not really, say local real estate professionals. But it generally takes a little more work and time to get a higher-end home to sell.

"We've been in a seller-dominated market for several years," says Dan Wolf, owner of Wolf Real Estate Professionals with Re/ Max Dynamic Properties.

But shifts in the Alaska economy, from oilfield companies downsizing to reductions in the number of state workers, have made buyers more cautious, he says.

"People buying houses want to be pretty sure they're getting a value. I'd say it's a cautious market," Wolf says.

Bonnie Mehner, partner of Mehner Weiser Real Estate, with RE/MAX Dynamic Properties, says about 3 percent of the Anchorage-area homes on the Multiple Listing Service, or MLS, are listed at over $1 million. About 4 percent are listed between $750,000 and $999,999.

High-end homes make up about 7 percent of the market, but she says they only account for 2.2 percent of the sales in the last 365 days. Mehner says the number of above-$750,000 homes sold in the last 365 days is nearly identical to the number sold in the previous year.

"We can infer from this information that our market, overall, is holding up," Mehner writes in an email.

The broader market also showed good news, she says. Between August 18, 2015, and August 17, 2016, 2,921 houses were sold, compared with 2,994 houses sold during the same period the previous year, a downward change of 2.5 percent.

The Waiting Game

The numbers show higher-end homes are selling, but in most cases it takes longer to sell a home priced above $750,000 than a home in the median price range of around $360,000.

Bob Baer, a Realtor with Re/Max Dynamic Properties and former owner of Totem Realty, says most of the active listings on the MLS above the $750,000 price point have been on the market more than 100 days. Some have been on the market more than a year or even close to two years, he says. And many have been listed more than once, meaning they might have been listed 110 days ago, but perhaps they were on the market for a six-month stretch of time prior to that.

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