After three years of declining or flat activity, a part of Hawaii’s housing market aimed at vacationers is showing a pickup.

A new report tallying sales of residential property within master-planned resorts statewide said sale volume surged during the first half of this year — mainly in the second quarter. Prices, however, are lagging recent years and averaged $1.2 million in the January-June period.

The report by local housing market researcher Ricky Cassiday said the number of resort home sales in the first half of this year jumped 18 percent to 807 from 682 in the first half of last year.

More sales of vacation homes had been anticipated to happen sooner, especially given that Hawaii’s tourism industry has been setting new arrival and spending records for several years after the economic rebound that followed the national recession nearly a decade ago.

“Higher sales are a nice, albeit long-awaited, surprise,” Cassiday said. “I’ve been waiting for sales to go up. This is a long time after the recovery.”

Part of the limitation on resort home sales has been relatively little inventory added by developers on the neighbor islands, where most resorts with housing exist.

Cassiday said some developers are being more active, such as Canadian-based Brookfield Homes. And most of the increased sales earlier this year were concentrated at condominium projects on Hawaii island and Kauai, he added.

Cassiday’s report includes sales of new and previously owned condos, single-family homes and house lots within master-planned resorts such as Mauna Lani on Hawaii island, Kaanapali on Maui, Princeville on Kauai and Ko Olina on Oahu.

Tomo Matsumoto, owner of Hapuna Realty, believes it’s a good time to add new inventory to the resort home market at Mauna Kea Resort, where a developer plans to sell 191 house lots and homes while the Hapuna Beach Prince Hotel gets a $46 million makeover next year and is re-branded as the Westin Hapuna Beach Resort.

West Point Investment Corp., a California-based developer, is rolling out sales for an initial 11 house lots along the resort’s golf course priced from $795,000 to $1.3 million. In addition, part of the oceanfront hotel is being converted into 60 condos priced from about $1.5 million to $7 million. And a separate oceanfront building that used to be the hotel’s presidential suite is being turned into a roughly 11,000-square-foot residence to cost around $19 million.

Matsumoto said three of the lots have already been reserved. She also said sales reservations are being taken for the condos and that the $19 million home is expected to be put on the market by the end of the year.

“The timing is perfect because the hotel is going to be renovated,” Matsumoto said.

Cassiday said he’s not expecting many other new resort home development projects in the next year or so, which should elevate competition among buyers for existing resort homes and help push prices higher. During the first half of this year, the average price was $1.2 million. That was down from $1.3 million in the prior two years. The high was $1.6 million in 2008.

Cassiday predicted that the number of sales for all of 2017 will top the last three years, when total sales were roughly between 1,300 and 1,400. In 2013 there were 1,530 resort home sales. The high was about 2,300 sales in 2005.