A  growing number of buyers are spending $1 million or far more for a house in the Houston area last year. There were almost 800 buyers who paid at least $1 million for houses in 2007 through transactions handled by agents in places like Stablewood, Memorial and River Oaks. That was up 23 percent from the year before and 64 percent over the sales for 2005, according to the Houston Association of Realtors.

High-priced sales have given a boost to the overall market, though million-dollar sales only represented about 1 percent of the homes sold through the Multiple Listing Service last year. 

The local and global energy market is bringing people to Houston from Europe, Asia, South America, Canada and elsewhere.

Home values are spiking in upscale neighborhoods where builders are demolishing outdated properties to put up amenity-filled mansions, according to a study on 2007 housing prices conducted by the University of Houston's Institute for Regional Forecasting.

Almost 10 percent of the sales in River Oaks were new homes. And in Tanglewood, 21 percent of last year's sales were of new homes. Luxury residential construction is turning more neighborhoods into million-dollar markets. In the Houston Heights a third of the sales were new and values per square foot were up almost 7 percent to $177.18, according to the study. More homes in Bellaire, Afton Oaks and even suburban areas such as The Woodlands and Kingwood are selling for seven figures.

The average time it took to sell a $1 million or pricier home in February was 111 days, according to the latest data from HAR. That's down from 164 days last year.