Emotionally battered by the Los Angeles real estate market, where first-time buyers still fight over small tract homes priced at $750,000, Kali Nikitas and her husband all but gave up on homeownership this summer.

“The prices of L.A. real estate were mind-blowing, and we thought we could never afford to buy,” says Nikitas, 43, an administrator at an arts college. “My husband said, ‘Let’s forget about it. This is killing me.’ ”

Then she spotted—on Craigslist, of all places—an ad claiming, “Modern architecture, Great neighborhood, Won’t last ...  $585,000.” She clicked on to an architectural jewel: a two-bedroom spec home designed in the late 1930s by the early modernist master R.M. Schindler, a protégé of Frank Lloyd Wright and one of the most celebrated architects in Los Angeles.

“When I walked into that house,” Nikitas says, “there was a sophistication to the structure that was so clear to me. There was a kind of double euphoria. Something so unattainable was now at our fingertips.”

She and her artist husband bought the house for $5,000 less than the asking price. Why so cheap? The location—North Inglewood—is a racially mixed neighborhood free of celebrities and glamour.

Architecturally significant 20th century homes often sell for surprisingly low prices, particularly in a softening real estate market. The catch, often, is the location. While it is difficult to track the number of architecturally distinguished homes in B- or C-list locations, or their average prices, buyers who make pedigree a priority can find deals around the country, according to homeowners and real estate brokers (see slideshow).

Take the slick, mid-century modern homes designed by the Chicago firm Keck & Keck. They regularly sell for well over $1 million—if the house is in good condition and located in a prestigious North Shore suburb. But in the south-side suburb of Chicago Heights, you can find a four-bedroom Keck & Keck with all the trimmings—14-foot wood beam ceilings, slate floors, glass walls—for just $218,000.

Some consider the homes a form of modern art and are happy to make the trade-off. “I would say a very significant number of our clients are visualizers,’’ says Crosby Doe, a Los Angeles real estate agent with the firm Architecture for Sale. “They’re directors, they’re designers, they’re artists. They understand space and proportions, and they understand history.”

And they are not impressed with supersized living—the master suite large enough for a volleyball game, the home theater, the stadium-size kitchen. A hallmark of mid-century modernism is living on a human scale. Frank Lloyd Wright, for example, considered kitchens, bathrooms, and bedrooms to be private areas, and designed them to be (by today’s standards) relatively small.