The luxury housing market has been quite active the last couple weeks.

The Trump International Hotel & Tower in Chicago made a big splash last week when it listed one of the most expensive slices of real estate in the city’s history – an 89th-floor, 14,260 square-foot, $32-million penthouse.

Trump Tower, though, is not the only outlet unleashing high-priced luxury properties onto the marketplace, and other arenas have offered us three reasons to feel pretty peachy about luxury properties in 2012:

1. As Gary Lucido pointed out in a recent blog, within a week of the Trump Tower listing, properties at the Palmolive and 21 E Huron also hit the market. The Palmolive listing, a five-bed, four-bath triplex penthouse, is listed for $18.4 million, and is garnering attention for its past use as the original office of Playboy mogul Hugh Hefner and for its seller – Lake Forest native Vince Vaughn; the Huron listing, at $7.9 million, comes with three beds, 3.5 baths, two fireplaces and three garage spaces.
2. Chicago is not the only market seeing high-priced condo listings. In Miami, a triplex penthouse at the Continuum in South Beach recently sold for $25 million to an Italian buyer, setting a new record for condo sales in the city, and shortly after, another Continuum unit sold (also to a foreign buyer) for $16.25 million – and just a month after being initially listed.
3. Such activity could explain the recent uptick in asking prices; Trulia’s latest Price Monitor showed asking prices for homes have risen 2 percent from last quarter.