Remember when a million dollars was a lot of money? Welcome back to the future. Back during the boom in housing, a million didn’t buy what it used to. Thanks to easy credit — usually in the form of a subprime mortgage — demand for swimming pools, marble pillars and big square footage shot up, driving prices ever higher. In parts of red-hot suburban areas like the South Florida cities of Parkland, Coral Springs and Sunrise, single-floor cookie-cutter homes could reach the seven-figure milestone. But not anymore. The credit and housing crises have flushed out speculative and overreaching buyers. The result: Sales of homes for more than $1 million are 50 percent lower than their all-time high, in July 2005, according to the firm MDA DataQuick. That’s twice as bad as the downturn for housing of all price tags in the same time period. “Everyone has less money than they once had,” Amy Wright, of The Real Estate Office in Rancho Santa Fe, California, told an Associated Press reporter. “That has certainly affected the nouveau riche, and that’s definitely in that $1 million price point.” There’s a definite flip side to that market statistic, though: If you’re fortunate enough to still have money, there’s likely never been a better time to acquire “luxury” property at bargain rates. Such homebuyers should be able to get roughly 20 percent “more house” than they did in recent years, Josh Brian Losh of luxuryrealestate.com told the AP. In Rancho Santa Fe, a chi-chi parcel of San Diego County that’s played host to Bill Gates and Howard Hughes and where the top price listing is almost $30 million, the unthinkable is now a reality: You can get a house for a million bucks. Foreclosures, short sales and the like now account for 15 percent of all sales in the enclave, and prices have dropped and average of 30 percent.

Want 2,200 square feet Spanish-style home in a gated golf-course Rancho Sante Fe community? All it takes is $800,000. There, as elsewhere, big-item sellers are cutting prices about 50 percent faster than the national average for all housing, according to Trulia.com. If you’ll need financing, though, all bets are off. Average rates for 30-year jumbo loans — mortgages with original principal balances higher than $729,750 — stood at 6.18 percent, about a percentage point higher than standard loans, the AP reported. So if you financed only $800,000 on a home, your monthly payment would approach $5,000 a month — property taxes not included. In other words, if you make at least $200,000 a year, or if you just have a million bucks lying around, you’d be best advised to find thyself a McMansion. As for everybody else, the million-dollar house remains a dream — albeit a slightly less impossible one.