This restored Hyde Park mansion sold for $3.75 million after a month on the market.
Linda Oyama Bryan

In Chicago’s Hyde Park, a meticulously restored, 11-bedroom mansion sold this past spring for $3.75 million after about 1½ months on the market. The sale, to an all-cash buyer, was the highest home sale ever recorded on the South Side, according to listing agent

Jan Smith

of @properties.

Outside Atlanta, a 26,000-square-foot house modeled after Los Angeles’s Playboy Mansion sold in a very different market. Listed in January for $3.85 million, it was repriced for less than $3 million and sold in September for $2.175 million. The high-end real-estate market in Atlanta is “still soft,” says listing agent

Jim Gibson,

adding that the affluent suburb of Roswell, where the house is located, is faring better than lower-priced markets in the area.

The mansion’s living room.
@properties

The number of luxury-home sales picked up steam in 2013, as wealthy home buyers returned after several years of sitting it out. But the recovery remains uneven, with some markets experiencing record-high prices while others are far below their boom-time levels.

Among the 51 homes included in the 2013 House of the Year poll, 10 had sold or were in contract after being featured on WSJ.com, according to data compiled in early January. (All the homes in the poll were on the market at some point in 2013.) But nearly all sold for less than their asking prices. The Hyde Park mansion that sold for $3.75 million had been asking $4.9 million. Ms. Smith said it was difficult to price the home because there had been few comparable sales of houses of that size in the neighborhood. Owner

Linda Heagy

said the sale price was less than she and her husband had hoped, but they were reluctant to lose the deal. “We thought we could be sitting here two years from now and not have another bid this good,” Ms. Heagy said.

ATLANTA: The indoor pool of a house that sold for $2.175 million; listing agent Jim Gibson says the owner had spent about $9 million renovating the home.
Matt Terry

Especially in areas where the real-estate market is very active, “there is a disconnect between reality and what the sellers expect,” said

Budge Huskey,

president and chief executive of Coldwell Banker Real Estate. Despite strong demand from buyers, “you have to be realistic on pricing.”

Nationally, the high-end home market has generally been outperforming the overall market. In the first three quarters of 2013, Coldwell Banker’s luxury-home program saw its number of sales over $1 million jump 28% over the same period in 2012, said Mr. Huskey. That compares with growth of roughly 11% for the market as a whole.

High-end buyers are less likely to be affected by the still-tight financing market. And sellers tend to prefer all-cash deals, said

Cheryl Loeffler

of Premier Sotheby’s International Realty in Sarasota, Fla. She listed a home on the barrier island of Longboat Key in January for $5.2 million. Just over a month later, the waterfront home sold to an all-cash buyer for $4.75 million.

The pickup is pronounced in major coastal cities like Los Angeles, New York and Miami, said real-estate appraiser

Jonathan Miller

of Miller Samuel Real Estate Appraisers in New York. In Los Angeles County, sales of houses costing $1 million or more jumped to 6,527 homes in 2013 from 4,821 the previous year, according to data from real-estate listings company Zillow.

In March,

Santiago Arana

of Los Angeles-based brokerage the Agency listed Gary and

Nili Ovsiowitz’s

home in the affluent neighborhood of Pacific Palisades for $16.999 million. The Tuscan-style house found a buyer within a week, and closed in May for $15.35 million—the highest price per square foot of the year for Pacific Palisades, Mr. Arana said.

But the Pacific Palisades market is the exception. Prices are still “way off peak levels” in most areas of the country, said

Stan Humphries,

chief economist at Zillow.

In Paradise Valley, Ariz., “we’re in a good, stable market but we’re nowhere near where we used to be,” said real-estate agent

Jack Luciano

of Walt Danley Realty. Mr. Luciano co-listed a home there for $5.75 million in August. It is now in escrow and slated to close in early February for “close to the asking price,” he said.

The home has sold twice since it was featured as The Wall Street Journal’s House of the Day in January of 2013. Then-owners Greg and

Ruth Burk,

who had listed the home for $5.699 million, sold it to Mr. Luciano’s client for $5.25 million in February, according to public records. The Burks had purchased it in 2010 for $2.95 million.

The home is still worth less than it would have been at the market’s peak: Mr. Luciano estimated that in 2006, it would likely have sold for about $11 million. The original owners had spent some $8 million building the home, Mr. Luciano said, then lost the property to the bank.

Write to Candace Taylor at candace.taylor@wsj.com