House sales in the Hamptons, the summer resort of Wall Street executives, rose 32% to a record in the first half of the year, as bonus-enriched buyers sought vacation homes in celebrity studded neighborhoods.

A total of 2,271 homes sold in five towns on the eastern tip of New York’s Long Island, compared with 1,717 a year ago, said George Simpson, chairman of Suffolk Research Service Inc., a real estate records company in Southampton, N.Y. The pace is more than double the American sales increase of 13%.

The most expensive properties were in East Hampton, where the average price climbed to more than $1 million for the first time.

As Wall Street’s year-end bonuses topped $10 billion, buyers are willing to pay top dollar to live in the same town as financier Carl Icahn, comedian Jerry Seinfeld, actress Renee Zellweger, and clothing designer Calvin Klein, Mr. Simpson said.

“The Hamptons market is driven by star power,” Mr. Simpson, 66, said in a telephone interview. “There are a lot of people who want to spend their summers with celebrities, and the supply of homes is limited.”

As prices increased and the number of transactions rose, the dollar volume of sales surged 82% to $1.92 billion in Southampton, East Hampton, Riverhead, Shelter Island, and Southold. The town with the biggest volume was Southampton, the largest of the five, gaining 91% to $1.07 billion.

For all the towns, the average sale price rose 38% to an all-time high of $844,195, according to data from Suffolk Research.

In the first half of 2000, the peak of the Internet stock bubble, 2,241 houses sold, a record that stood until this year. At that time, the average price was $497,605.

In Southampton, which includes Sag Harbor, Bridgehampton, and Water Mill, the average price rose 37% to $977,491. Shelter Island had the biggest price gain, increasing 57% to $883,646, though with only 48 transactions.

“I haven’t seen anything like this since the 1980s,” said Judi Desiderio, a vice president with Corcoran Group, the largest brokerage in the Hamptons. “We’ve surpassed the market we saw in 2000, when it was Internet-millionaire money.”

On the so-called North Fork, the less expensive area of the Hamptons, the town of Southold, including Orient Point, had an average price of $593,206, up 27%. Prices in the town of Riverhead increased 24% to $361,986.

Still, prices aren’t likely to rise at the same pace next year because mortgage rates are expected to climb, making financing more expensive, said Paul Brennan, regional manager of Prudential Douglas Elliman Real Estate. Fannie Mae projects that the average annual rate for a 30-year home loan will gain half a percentage point to 6.5% in 2005.

“What traditionally happens here in a down market is things just stop,” Mr. Brennan said in a telephone interview. “That’s why our market is different from other markets – there’s a depth of wealth that gives people the option of holding on when times are tough.”

Values have risen so dramatically, some people have put “wishful” price tags on their properties, said the vice president of Corcoran Group, Diane Saatchi. About one-third of the homes available for sale are listed at prices that don’t reflect true market values, she said.

The price for novelist B.H. Friedman’s six-bedroom home on East Hampton’s Georgica Pond was dropped to $11 million last month, the second price reduction since it came on the market last year at $17 million.

No one has surpassed the record sales price of $32 million that Mr. Seinfeld paid for pop singer Billy Joel’s East Hampton oceanfront mansion in 2000.

“It’s hard not to get caught up in the frenzy,” Mr. Saatchi said in a telephone interview.

“Homes that are priced right are flying off the shelf, but there’s a fair amount of homes that are just sitting there, sometimes for a year or more.”