After looking for a home for a month, first-time buyers Rayce and Greta Loritz are already getting frustrated.

"We rent an apartment,"said Greta Loritz. "We want to quit throwing our money away. And it's just not big enough."

The couple have two boys, a 7-month-old and a 2-year-old. They want a home with a yard, an unfinished basement, more space than their apartment, room to grow, they said. They want to stay in Bismarck, too, near the kids' day care.

All for about $130,000 to $140,000.

In Bismarck, those homes seem to be hard to come by.

"If you're looking in Bismarck, they're nowhere to be found,"Rayce Loritz said. Most homes they've looked at in that price range need work, or, if they were updated, they get snatched off the market within a day.

Their frustration reflects the current market in Bismarck, which continues to buck nationwide reports of housing slumps.

New homes, existing homes and condos are still steadily selling in the area, according to Nancy Deichert, president of the Bismarck Mandan Board of Realtors.

"Our real estate market is still very good,"Deichert said. "Especially compared to some of the other markets in the country."

Market stats

Existing home sales in the area are pretty comparable to last year, according to recent statistics. This time last year, 291 single-family homes were sold compared to 285 this year.

The marked difference is in average sale price, though.

Steadily increasing valuations helped bring average sale price up from $142,472 for the first four months of last year, up to an average of $161,716 this year, according to Bismarck Mandan Board of Realtors statistics.

Residential values in Bismarck are set to increase about 8.76 percent this year, lower than last year's double-digit increase but still a considerably stable figure for home sellers to hang their investment hats on.

"For all buyers in our market, real estate continues to prove to be an excellent investment,"Deichert said.

First home frustration

Those steady increases may pose a problem for first-time home buyers, though.

At least for the Loritz family, steady market increases mean either less home for their dollar, or older homes that may require more work than they'd hoped.

Looking at a higher price range isn't an option, they said.

"Especially with it being our first house, we don't want to get in over our head,"Greta Loritz said.

Deichert agreed that the inventory level for the first-time buyer's price range - $100,000 to $150,000 - is pretty low.

Their options? Look outside of the city, at Lincoln or even across the river in Mandan. In fact, according to reports, homes in Lincoln and Mandan are steadily spending fewer days on the market and show impressive increases in average prices.

Deichert said that areas of the country experiencing slumpsare feeling the backlash of too much growth and appreciation too quickly. The increases were unsustainable, leading to current depressed real estate markets those areas are feeling today.

"As a result, real estate has become unaffordable in those areas,"she said. "Affordable housing is an issue that is a growing concern in Bismarck-Mandan."

It seems, then, that area buyers are catching on and looking outside of the city to meet their first-home needs.

Condo craze?

Not in Bismarck and Mandan.

On the other end of "overdid it"when it came to condo construction in the past few years, Deichert said. Cities were obsessed with building new condos or converting older buildings into apartment-style condos, to get a jump on people investing in second homes or retirement homes.

But area developers didn't fall into the condo conundrum. There seem to be just enough in the market for the demand, according statistics.

There are a number of varieties in the area, ranging from apartment-style, starting at $80,000, to luxury retirement condos, which hit the $200,000 to $260,000 price range.

Developers seemed slow to build more condos in the past few years, and some who did tried to set their properties apart from the rest.

Tri-Star Construction recently finished their second condo complex in Mandan, called Little Heart Condos.

The company considered the area's stable demand for condos, then took into account the needs of their potential clients by building slab-on-grade condo communities with no steps, no elevators and wide open floor plans, said Kurt Sabot, one of the owners of the company.

"We just really felt there was a need for this type of condo in the area,"Sabot said.

The Little Heart communities are targeted toward the retirement home buyers, Sabot said. They began building the luxury condos in 2005 and finished the first set in 2006.

"They don't want to buy a condo with steps and stairs, and then have to move again,"if health problems begin to restrict their movement, for example, he said.

The first building, with eight condos, is almost sold. The second building has offers on a couple of the condos, and a third building due to be built in Bismarck has already generated interest, Sabot said.

He said the company may even branch out into other communities, if the need is there.

Stability is key

Currently, the real estate market in North Dakota is as stable as buyers and sellers would want it to be, Deichert said.

Developments are going up based on demand, not necessarily in overly optimistic anticipation of demand. Trends, such as condos, were taken with a grain of salt or built as a response to market demand, such as Tri-Star Construction's communities.

"It's a good market for both buyers and sellers,"Deichert said. "Buyers are able to get great interest rates, and sellers are able to get good prices for their properties."

(Reach reporter Crystal R. Reid at 250-8261 or at crystal.reid@;bismarcktribune.com.)