Creighton and Nikki Alexander paid $299,900 – the asking price – for their new house in Lawrence and they love their new digs.

Four bedrooms.

Four baths.

A finished basement.

“It’s the floor plan – the flow,” Creighton Alexander said. “It’s just what we wanted.”

But don’t go looking for 2-inch blinds, granite countertops or brushed-nickel faucets in the new place off Harvard Road – at least not yet.

The Alexanders’ new tri-level home, on Allen Court in the heart of the growing Foxchase South subdivision near Langston Hughes School, offers an example of what has become a market reality in Lawrence.

As costs continue to rise for everything from land to construction materials to labor, folks like the Alexanders are finding that $300,000 just doesn’t buy as many extras as it used to in Lawrence.

That means what once were sure-fire deluxe homes are no longer quite so deluxe. Features once commonplace in a $300,000 home – a level that remains at least $100,000 above the median price paid for single-family homes in town – now are becoming less prevalent, as the gap between average and above-average listings continues to narrow.

At the highest reaches of the market, Realtors for months have been busy showing more than a dozen homes listed for more than $1 million. A couple properties are even said to be approaching closings in the coming weeks, in what would be the first seven-figure resale transactions in town.

“Three-hundred thousand can get you a solid, good-value home,” said Mike McGrew, vice chairman for Coldwell Banker McGrew Real Estate. “But if you want to start tricking it out, it’s not going to be a four-bedroom, three-baths, three-car-garage home with all amenities.

“It’s not to say there aren’t some $300,000 houses that do have some of these tricks, but it’s rare. And It certainly won’t be a new house.”

Plenty of choices

Such observations come as the availability of $300,000 homes continues to favor buyers, although not as much as perhaps a year ago. As of Friday, there were 24 homes priced from $290,000 to $310,000 available through the Lawrence Board of Realtors Multilist, the clearinghouse for homes listed for sale. Of those, 13 were new construction.

There have been 16 such homes sold or placed under contract since Jan. 1, suggesting that the availability of properties in the $300,000 range is running slightly beyond what is considered market equilibrium. The National Board of Realtors says that a six-month supply gives equal footing to buyers and sellers.

The nationwide supply for the past several years has been about 4.5 months, said Walter Molony, a spokesman for the association in Washington, D.C. Now it’s shifting to closer to 6 months.

While price increases are slowing significantly in what have been the hottest markets – such as California, south Florida and others – many smaller Midwestern and Southern areas actually have been gaining momentum, he said. And as the overall economy gains strength, employers hire more people and those already employed feel more secure in their jobs.

That’s good news for college towns such as Lawrence, he said, where employment spikes and declines tend to be less common.

Buying at $300,000 in Lawrence shouldn’t be much of a stretch, Molony said, given that it’s not all that far from the national median price of $218,000, and that the Lawrence market generally is poised for continued strength.

“You’ve got affordability in a market like Lawrence, which is not the case in San Francisco,” he said.

Building value

In Lawrence this year, listings in the $300,000 range have spanned from a new 1,443-square-foot condo sold in the Hobbs Taylor Lofts downtown to a 30-year-old, 4,556-square-foot rancher with a basement near the Lawrence Country Club.

“If you want to go older, you can get bigger,” said Mark Buhler, an executive for Stephens Real Estate Inc. “You can look in some established, very successful neighborhoods. If they happen to be dated – if you have any design flair, or elbow grease, and want to make something different – some people believe that you have a much better chance of building equity by buying an older place.”

That’s what the Alexanders thought they’d do. The couple had bought, updated and sold three “fixer-upper” homes in the Dallas area during their eight years working at Southern Methodist University:

¢ The first, a three-bedroom, 2,500-square-foot home, was bought for $139,000 and sold two years later for $189,000.

¢ The second, a Highland Park condo with less than 1,000 square feet of space, was bought for $139,000 and sold for $169,000.

¢ The third, a 2,200-square-foot house, was bought for $210,000 and sold recently for $250,000.

As they prepared to relocate to Lawrence – they both start July 1 as pastors for the Methodist campus ministry at Kansas University – they started looking for options. They checked out about 30 homes in town, starting at $250,000.

But as they surveyed the market, they found that many homes they’d been checking out in the $270,000 price range – often 20 or 30 years old – would need a lot of work, Creighton Alexander said.

Comfort at home

“We’d be putting in $20,000 just to get the place ready,” he said, ticking off needs for new paint, a bathroom remodel or other projects. “I’m here with a new job, a new place, a new town – and three kids who are all moving around and active – and I wanted to get out of the home-improvement business.”

So now the Alexanders are busy unpacking boxes and getting settled on Allen Court. The place has all the basics they need, and their children – Canon, 4, Whitby, 2, and Cosmo, 8 months – run, walk and crawl around like they’ve lived in the place for years.

But Nikki Alexander knows there’s still work to be done. Even in a new house, she’s looking to add the blinds, replace the chrome faucets, install granite countertops and complete other as-yet-undetermined improvements that just a few years ago already would have been in place in a $300,000 home.

She’s looking forward to her father hauling up some limestone from the family ranch in Oklahoma, to augment the landscaping that soon will materialize amid the sod-only backyard – an area that lacked privacy until the Alexanders added another $4,400 to their purchase price, the cost for installing a cedar fence.

So the home went for more than $300,000, buying a larger-than-average lot on a cul-de-sac three blocks from a school and without a need for major renovations.

The extras will just take some time.

“This place is great,” Nikki Alexander said, looking out the kitchen window at the roof of Langston Hughes School. “But after we’re done with everything, it will just pop.”