America's House Party

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A sizable chunk of Miami's condo buyers--as much as 70%, estimates real estate analyst Lewis Goodkin--is made up of investors itching to flip condos like scalpers wanting to unload Orange Bowl tickets. And the story is similar in other highly developed metro areas. The biggest-paying bets in Las Vegas are being laid on the condos and hotel condos (essentially, hotel suites that you can buy) going up on the Strip. On Valentine's Day morning, Bruce Hiatt, a broker and co-owner of Luxury Realty Group, showed up at the Strip's Four Seasons Hotel with a stack of 14 signed checks. Each of his clients was determined to buy a spot in the Cosmopolitan Resort and Casino, a property that will not exist until late 2007 or 2008 and for which a shovel will not touch the earth until fall. "It's a zoo," says Hiatt. "Buildable land here is running out. We have only one place to go, and that's up." By March 1, the tiniest of the hypothetical condos had risen in price $100,000 to $150,000.

Zealous new investors going into a hot field, chasing market momentum and betting huge sums on the belief that this may be a new era: it sounds disquietingly like the late-'90s day traders who went the way of the Pets.com sock puppet. Does the parallel bother Keith Weaver, who is contemplating ditching his job as General Mills operations manager for the real estate biz? Nah. "We might be riding that wave," he says. "But the wave is there. So I'm going to get on it." Weaver's plan is to ride south, into the Florida market. Max Kaiser, make room.

• HOUSE RICH OR HOUSE POOR?

Of course, you don't need a portfolio of condos to have made a pile. Average homeowners who bought in the '90s--not to mention those who have owned for decades--are now, like modern-day Clampetts, sitting atop newly discovered gushers of wealth. Many have borrowed against their fat cushions of equity. Some--like bettors taking chips off a blackjack table--have sold, trading down to smaller places or swapping a city apartment for a calmer, cheaper life in the country. Still others have stayed put and splurged. Lucky Erganian and her husband, now deceased, bought their Woodland Hills, Calif., home in 1982 for $260,000. Today she's in the midst of a six-figure renovation. Real estate agents daily slip flyers onto her porch boasting of the windfalls they have won for her neighbors. "The one I have now," says Erganian, 58, "lists three that sold for $1.2 million, $1.3 million and $3.9 million. I love to go look at [the houses] and say, 'They don't have this that my house has, and they don't have that that my house has.'"