The apartment Sheree Bykofsky owned in Manhattan was widely admired by her friends. It had two bedrooms, two baths and a fireplace — plus a top-rung address, even by the patrician standards of her area.

But Bykofsky, a professional writer and literary agent, challenged herself to go even higher on the housing ladder. She followed the steps outlined in a life-planning book she wrote, titled: “Me: Five Years from Now.”

“By pursuing a step-by-step approach, I made a move from great to even better,” she says.

The Bay Area appears to be shaking off the nation’s housing doldrums.

Local home prices are still going through the roof, even though far fewer properties are changing hands. That contradicts the national real estate trend of slumps in both price and sales volume.

Why does the region’s housing seem to defy gravity?

It’s the wealth effect.

“The Bay Area is one of the strongest economies in the country today,” said Ken Rosen, chairman of the Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics at UC Berkeley. “The upper end of the market in the inner areas (San Francisco and the counties closest to it) is doing extremely well. This is a completely different trend than the rest of the country.”