It’s good at the top.

Thanks to Mexican nationals and Eagle Ford Shale millionaires helping drive the market for expensive homes, luxury real estate appears to be outperforming the rest of the housing market.

Custom builders are starting more million-dollar spec homes, those built on speculation before a buyer is in hand. And even within luxury neighborhoods, sometimes it’s the most expensive homes that are selling the fastest.

“Who is the most recession-proof? High-income people. Who can more easily qualify for loans? Who can come up with more equity,” asked James Gaines, research economist with the Real Estate Center at Texas AM University. “The world is not egalitarian. That end is going to be more active than the lower end of the market.”

While the median home price across San Antonio is up about 2 percent for the year, it’s risen 3.3 percent in the $750,000-and-up category, said Jason Glast of Keller Williams Luxury International.

At Cordillera Ranch in Boerne, 35 homes are under construction and another 20 have submitted plans for approval, with an average price for just the house — not the lot — at around $1 million, said Charlie Hill, vice president of Cordillera Ranch Development Corp.

“In every unit, the most expensive stuff sells first,” Hill said. “It’s staggering. The bigger challenge for us is going to be to get the builders going quickly enough.”

That’s in stark contrast to 2008 and 2009, when the luxury market slowed to a trickle. Then, Cordillera Ranch decided not to drop its lot prices because Hill said there really wasn’t a point in doing so.

“We didn’t feel there was some magic number you could drop to to spur demand,” Hill said. “There just wasn’t demand.”

The San Antonio-area luxury market was hit hard in 2008 when ATT moved its headquarters to Dallas.

That flooded the market with executive-level homes. And then the national economy and the stock market hit the skids.

Glast said the ATT homes sold at a discount to other similar homes on the market, creating a buyer’s market for luxury sales for a few years. But now that the ATT sellers have moved on, Mexican nationals and Eagle Ford Shale millionaires are two groups of buyers shopping for luxury homes.

“Mexican nationals are coming in because of cartel violence,” Glast said. Many wealthy Mexicans are moving their families to high-end, mostly gated neighborhoods across the North Side of San Antonio, looking for security, he said.

In many cases, the father will continue to commute back and forth to Mexico for work.

And many area residents have benefitted from drilling in the Eagle Ford Shale.

The shale formation sweeps from the Mexican border to East Texas, and is considered one of the biggest oil and gas plays in the country.

“There are a lot of local people that own land in that area. They’ve become cash-rich very recently,” Glast said.

Gaines said many people want to put some of their sudden wealth into something tangible, like a house.

“All of these people who find themselves with a lot of money don’t want to put it all in the bank and in stocks,” he said.

Likewise, the market for rural land appears to be improving, after a string of quiet years, said Rick Kuper of Kuper Sotheby’s International Realty.

“Ranch sales have been really strong,” Kuper said. “The last three years have been probably the slowest in Texas history.”

Kuper said the activity on the upper end could bode well for other price points.

“I’m encouraged for the whole market when that is going on,” Kuper said. “We’re starting to see spec houses going back up, so the pulse is definitely stronger and more vibrant and seems to be on track again.”

Custom builder Art Burdick, though, said it’s all relative. Five years ago, he was building about 24 homes a year, and he now builds about a dozen.

But Burdick, too, has seen an uptick in buyers. Interest rates remain low and prices for materials and labor haven’t risen, factors that seem to be luring luxury buyers into building homes.

“There are people who we’ve been talking to for two years who are interested but haven’t felt any sense of urgency,” Burdick said. “Those people are getting off the fence.”

John Flournoy, managing broker with the Phyllis Browning Co., said most people are expecting a strong 2012 for homes priced at $500,000 and up.

As for everyone else?

“People like to watch the high end,” said Flournoy. “They figure that if it comes back, everything else will come back next. I think it will carry some other price ranges with it next year.”