Pamela Sage, an agent with Baird & Warner’s Gold Coast office, saw similar expansions in her business last year.

“My personal business was great in 2011, and I think that the people out there who can afford to buy luxury properties are really not deterred,” Sage says.

Considering that housing is still an industry in recovery, though, the luxury markets are still presenting a number of unique challenges for agents, even under the guise of a turnaround. Moze says that she frequently confronts unrealistic and borderline-offensive pricing expectations from interested buyers of her properties.

That buyer approach, Moze says, is fairly recent. When the precipitous price declines in the luxury markets were occurring from 2008 to 2011, buyers would often scout the local markets for ideal houses and then, upon pinpointing a favorite, watch the property closely as the home’s value inevitably fell further and further as the market worsened. Fear of competition, that fellow prospective buyers were engaging in the same practice, would eventually set in, and they would then emerge and make an offer on the property – an offer still far below the seller’s already-depreciated asking price, basically an offer not based on comparisons, the condition of the property or any other seemingly reasonable justifications for such a low asking price, but on the simple fact that the market is depressed, the buyers are aware of that fact and they are looking for a once-in-a-lifetime deal on a gorgeous luxury home.

“I don’t think buyers are being very realistic, and they’re not being very fair,” Moze says. “They are not really truly looking at comparisons and justifying their offer; they’re just kind of throwing numbers out there.”

The process, Moze continues, is particularly difficult on sellers.

“The homeowners can get pretty offended,” Moze says. “Sometimes they don’t even want to respond with a counter-offer because they’re insulted. They feel, ‘Hey look, we’ve done everything. We’ve prepared our home, it looks great, it shows well, we have it priced well below where it should be.’ And offers do come in, but they come in low, and the sellers get very discouraged.”

Buyer eccentricities have posed problems for Sage as well, though her issues stem more from inventory and the hyper-specificity in which some buyers search for properties.

“You may have somebody who wants a luxury property, but they insist on having a lake view and outdoor space. That doesn’t seem like it would be such a reach on a wish list, but that’s going to take a couple of beautiful buildings off the running,” Sage says, who went on to explain that the Palmolive Building and 77 East Walton, buildings that are “luxury from head to toe,” are nonetheless lacking in balconies and views of the lakefront, and would be excluded from such a buyer’s short list of properties.

“There are certain things the buyer says, ‘I have to have,’” Sage says. “‘Don’t show me anything without outdoor space; I need to be able to walk outside.’”

One possible reason for such unwavering specifications is that, increased sales activity notwithstanding, research suggests that today’s luxury agents are still operating with an extremely small sample of the high net worth demographic. The 2011 Ipsos Mendelsohn Affluent Survey, an annual study conducted by the Ipsos Mendelsohn survey team that gathers an immense amount of data on the affluent class through interviews with 14,405 adults, offered a particularly telling portrait of that situation. Specifically targeting Americans with yearly household incomes of $100,000 or more, the study was representative of 58.5 million adults and 24.5 million households that, despite being only 21 percent of total U.S. households, comprise 60 percent of all U.S. household income and 70 percent of net worth. But, even with such wealth and influence, the study found that only 4 percent of the affluent class were planning on buying an existing-home in 2012, and only 4 percent were planning on selling their home.