REXBURG, Idaho — After selling houses in this Mormon university town in eastern Idaho for two decades, Ted Whyte knows what some of his customers want: A home near the new Mormon temple. If only he could use that in his ads.

"We'd love to, but we can't use that phraseology," said Whyte, who like 92 percent of Rexburg's 31,000 residents is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. "The Federal Fair Housing Act kicks in and calls it discriminatory."

Call it the "temple effect" — as towering structures like the one to be completed in Rexburg in February, or another slated to be finished in mid-2008 in Twin Falls 190 miles away, produce economic ripples.

Home prices in surrounding subdivisions escalate. Motels hawk rooms with temple views. Devout retirees relocate.

Unlike Mormon chapels where anybody can enter, temples are places where even LDS members must be in good standing with church leadership to get inside. Once there, they baptize the dead by proxy, marry for eternity and make sacred covenants with God — all beneath golden spires topped with Moroni, the angel that Mormons believe delivered the golden plates that form their gospel's foundation.

"It is always a constant reminder, when you see it sitting there and the beauty of it, of what I'm supposed to be doing," said Georgia Brown, a Twin Falls resident who says even her town's non-Mormons have taken notice of the new temple. "A friend asked me, 'Did you know our Moroni is bigger than the Boise Moroni?' Even for her, it's 'our' temple."

As the 2008 presidential run of LDS member and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney's piques interest in this 177-year-old American religion, the 13-million-person church has at least 13 new temples under construction or in planning around the world, including six in Latin America where it's growing quickly.

Just four are in the United States, with two in Idaho.

The Rexburg temple, to be the church's 125th worldwide, is about 57,500 square feet, rising 168 feet, 8 inches to the trumpet-blowing Moroni atop its single spire. Located near 20,000-student Brigham Young University-Idaho, a Mormon-owned school, the temple's exterior includes 637 composite concrete panels mixed with sunlight-catching quartz.

Stately leaded-glass windows are ornamented with wheat designs, a nod to the region's agricultural heritage.

Inside, the fixtures are art-deco, from the wall lamps to the stairway banisters. A blue-tiled baptismal font astride 12 oxen on the second floor is where Mormons induct dead relatives into the faith. Carpeted instructional rooms have colorful murals depicting elk and deer.

Young LDS couples will marry here in the same rooms where deceased partners are sealed together for all time. The temple culminates in the well-lighted "Celestial Room," where believers can meditate on their faith.