Home sales in Marin County, Calif., are great (if you're rich)

— -- Marin County, the wealthy, picturesque area just north of San Francisco, with San Francisco Bay on one side and the Pacific on the other, is known for the enormous redwoods in the Muir Woods forest and the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed civic center.

Yet even Marin hasn't escaped the meltdown in the credit markets. Sales of single-family homes priced under $1 million — the market mainly for first-time home buyers, if you can believe it — were off 21% last year compared with 2006. Meanwhile, condos below that price range plunged 32%, according to Valerie Castellana, president of the Marin Association of Realtors.

"The first-time home-buyer market has been most affected by changes in the banking structure," Castellana says. "There were products available to them with very little money down. Those products have mostly disappeared."

Still, the luxury end of the market, where buyers tend to pay cash, remains robust. Sales of homes priced above $3 million soared 65% last year; condos over $1 million jumped by 32%. That explains why Marin's median home price rose 9% last year, to $1,025,700, even though overall single-family home sales declined 9%. At the same time, the median price for a condo edged up 4% to $570,000, even though sales tumbled 22%.