Ultra-Luxury Homes Take 400% Longer to Sell Than Median-Priced Homes: Study

If you’re selling an ultra-luxury home, you better be prepared for the process to take a while.

Multimillion-dollar properties take 400 percent longer to sell than median-priced homes, averaging 319 days on the market, according to the latest Luxury Homes Index from Concierge Auctions, the largest luxury real estate auction house in the world. To arrive at these numbers, the company looked at the highest-grossing transactions in 56 of the country’s top luxury markets last year.

“Selling luxury real estate isn’t like selling ordinary assets: each property is unique, properties cannot change location, and luxury properties are, by definition, expensive,” Chad Roffers, the CEO of Concierge Auctions, said in a statement. “As a result, each luxury property for sale necessarily has very few relevant buyers that are interested in that particular property, in that particular location, and at that particular moment in time. The market is therefore slow.”

Among the high-end homes sold in 2024, 54 percent spent more than 180 days on the market, resulting in sales that were about 80 percent of the asking price. One in eight residences spent more than 600 days on the market, and 4 percent took more than 1,000 days to sell. Meanwhile, those that sold faster were more likely to achieve a sales price closer to the asking, averaging about 87 percent of that original list price.

While it may take longer than you’d like to get an ultra-luxury home off your hands, there is perhaps some good news in the market: Sales prices were up 4.7 percent last year compared with 2023. They haven’t reached the peak set in 2021, but Concierge Auctions expects the upward trend to continue. The strongest growth is being seen in Florida, where prices rose a whopping 30.2 percent, along with the Northwest Coast, and in Southern cities like Atlanta, Dallas, and Nashville.

Markets are down, meanwhile, in areas such as the East Coast (where prices fell 13 percent) and Southern California. Even with this slowdown, the market has grown substantially since a decade ago, when Concierge Auctions first began to track this data; since 2015, the average sales price has jumped an impressive 44.2 percent.

On the flip side, President Donald Trump’s tariffs and their effect on the economy have some high-end home buyers spooked. Several multimillion-dollar deals have fallen through in the past couple of weeks, as potential buyers grapple with whether right now is the best time to shell out for a new house, The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday. Given that, it may end up being a rather volatile year for luxury sales. Stay tuned.