Million-dollar homes are now a dime a dozen

updated 3:57 p.m. ET Sept. 27, 2005

NEW YORK - Everything about Frank Fazio’s new two-bedroom apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side is decidedly average, including its price: a hair under $1 million.

With five rooms and about 1,050 square feet of space, the place is a nice size, by New York standards, but it is no mansion. There are no chandeliers, no soaring cathedral ceilings and no doorman downstairs to help with groceries.

"There is nothing that would make you say, 'Wow this place must have cost a million bucks,'" said Fazio, 42, a banker who relocated from Chicago.

Yet pay a million he did, something more Americans are doing these days.

For the first time, there are more than 1 million owner-occupied homes in the United States worth $1 million or more, according to a Census Bureau survey published late last month.

Once a symbol of unusual wealth, million-dollar dwellings now seem like a dime a dozen in some places. San Francisco alone has more than 20,000 of them. There are another 46,000, or so, in Orange County, Calif.

In Manhattan, even someone with a million dollars in their pocket can't buy luxury. The average price for an apartment in all but Harlem and the borough’s northern tip climbed above $1.2 million in the second quarter of 2005, said Gregory Heym, chief economist for Terra Holdings, an owner of real estate brokerages in the city.

"For a million dollars, you couldn’t get a two-bedroom on the East Side," Heym said.

Diane Bondareff / AP Exterior of the Upper West Side apartment building where Frank Fazio purchased a two-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment three months ago for almost one million dollars.

The surge in high-end prices has happened quickly. The Census Bureau’s 2004 American Community Survey found 1,034,386 homes worth at least $1 million in 2004, compared to 595,441 in 2002 and only 394,878 in 2000.

Demand for housing is still outstripping supply in many U.S. markets, said John M. Clapp, a professor of finance and real estate at the University of Connecticut. Low interest rates have made it easier for people to afford more house, as have some new financing methods, like interest-only adjustable mortgages, which initially allow buyers to lower their monthly payments.

Even in land-rich cities like Phoenix, the demand for housing in mature neighborhoods has outstripped supply.

In a few exclusive communities, $1 million won’t buy you more than “an acre of dirt,” said Kristy Ryan, a broker at Re/Max Fine Properties in Scottsdale.

In other parts of town, $1 million is still enough to build a 4,000-square-foot villa with a pool and a three-car garage, but Ryan noted that the same house might have sold for $700,000 just five years ago.

"Some people are disappointed when they get here," she said of the northerners who continue to arrive in droves. "They don’t realize how much it has appreciated in the last few years."

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