If you get a lift from the treehouse- or playhouse-like appeal of soaring ceilings and 18-foot windows, you'll love loft living.

If expansive, towering spaces trigger feelings of vertigo or agoraphobia, leave the loft lifestyle to stauncher stomachs.

Love them or leave them, lofts are the new darling of the housing market out West as a fast-growing alternative niche in new housing trends, especially in redeveloping urban areas.

"There are real lofts like in New York and there are newly built faux lofts. You look at them and you say 'This would be great,' or you say 'Get me out of here,'" said Gerald Cox, spokesman for Novato, CA-based RealFacts, a multifamily housing market researcher that tracks rental and occupancy rates in a dozen Western states.

Lofts have become so popular, RealFacts this fall will include them in its market research, which already includes rental and occupancy rates of everything from studios to three bedroom townhomes.

"When we started fifteen years ago, there were no loft units anywhere but the East Coast. Now, the stylishness of such units permits them to rent for top dollar per square foot, and they tend to be viewed as desirable, with no lag in leasing them up," says Caroline S. Latham, CEO of RealFacts.

Lofts sales are hot too. Western developers can't carve them out of warehouses or build new ones fast enough. They often are snatched up before the construction dust clears.

In San Francisco, only about 100 lofts sold during the first quarter in 1999, but by the second quarter of 2003, that number had risen to 350 a quarter, according to Urban Bay Properties/LoftsUnlimited, a loft rentals and sales marketing company in San Francisco and Oakland.

"We've been doing lofts for six or seven years and our first Sacramento project, Metro Place, a live-work community, will be finished in May and the 10 units are all sold (with prices ranging from $230,000 to $355,000). They sold in three weeks," said Jill Hardy, vice president of Marketing for Regis Homes of Northern California.

"People who've purchased are an attorney, a photographer and an accountant. You can't have, say, like a hair salon, but it is great for those who want to work at home," Hardy added.

Loft prices vary widely but can be in line with similar-sized, existing, single-family detached homes depending on the locale. In Silicon Valley, Regis Homes' Market House Lofts, for example, sold for about $325,000 for lofts with one upstairs space to about $450,000 for lofts with two upstairs spaces for a total 1,500 square feet. But the specialty housing can bring a premium and sell for much more than similar sized single-family resale homes.

"If you have to live in a multifamily or high density housing, it's a coolness factor, a hipness factor and it works," says Mark Ritchie, president of Ritchie Commercial.

"As fast as you can build them you sell them. Anyone who has a choice, builds lofts," says Ritchie, whose company developed a temporary side venture marketing and selling lofts in Oakland's Jack London Square and other areas where commercial properties were being transformed into lofts.

Because the number of lofts is a tiny fraction of the housing inventory out West, there is no central lofts-for-sale-or-rent depository. Multiple listing services typically group them with townhomes and condos because new units are typically developed in communities governed by home owner associations. Buyers and renters are hungry for more information about the homes.

"Lofty Living In San Jose (CA)," a dated, but detailed accounting of lofts and loft development in Silicon Valley, is the single most visited page on the DeadlineNews.Com Web site, an electronic real estate news service in San Jose, CA. (The owner of that Web site authored this story and lives and works in a newly built loft in San Jose.)

Historically, lofts were room-free living spaces, typically carved out of commercial and industrial buildings as housing for young artists, the avant garde and other bohemian types who weren't a slave to the single-family home design, liked urban living and needed to put an affordable roof over their heads -- way over their heads.

True lofts typically have an open lower level (with perhaps only the kitchen and bathroom enclosed or otherwise structurally defined), soaring ceilings of 18 feet or more and a mezzanine structure or platform forming a second level or loft over a section of the main floor below. They often retain the industrial look and feel of the original building with exposed beams, ducts, and plumbing as well as concrete flooring and corrugated steel or masonry walls. Some of them are still serviced by a freight elevator.

Latham says in recent years lofts have popped up in the Pearl district of Portland, the old riverfront area of Kansas City and in the downtowns of Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Oakland, San Francisco and Silicon Valley.

The loft supply out West is constrained by the scarcity of old commercial and industrial buildings suitable for conversion, so developers are constructing more of them from the ground up with all the amenities of a new home and an old loft -- granite counter tops, stone-look or wood flooring, rough brick walls and wrought-iron detailing.

Buyers and renters should be aware that some units marketed as lofts are designed without the signature "loft" or open mezzanine second level. They look more like large open studios, rather than a true lofts.

"It's becoming just a marketing moniker. Some builders color open space units as lofts because they have an open kitchen, but they are just apartments. There are no grammar police when it comes to lofts," says Ritchie.

Loft dwellers typically like the large volumes of space as conducive to creative thinking, entertaining and as housing that offers a unique status symbol, but so much open space can feel cold and uninviting without the right decorative touches.

While some leave the loft look alone, the open space of a loft provides a unique canvass upon which to be creative. Texturizing or darkening ceilings can manipulate a loft's towering sense of scale; artistically rendered acoustic materials soften sounds; and rearranging furniture and suspending translucent screens or other materials personalize and add definition to spaces without losing the big-window light and wide openness that make lofts attractive.

"A lot of first-time buyers, and buyers in general, are unsure what lofts are about. Lofts appeal to a cross section of the buyer and rental market, including younger people looking for their first home, working couples, and the more sophisticated older couple that doesn't want the hassle of caring for a yard and maintenance of a large house," said Jim Mager, office manager of Urban Bay Properties/Lofts Unlimited.

Published: April 13, 2004

Use of this article without permission is a violation of federal copyright laws.

A journalist for 35-years, Broderick Perkins parlayed an old-school daily newspaper career into a digital news service offering editorial content and consulting services. Perkins' San Jose, CA-based DeadlineNews Group includes the flagship news site, DeadlineNews.Com, offering real estate, personal finance and consumer journalism, and a backshop, the Deadline Newsroom.