Located in the prestigious Mount Baker neighborhood, this dramatic home sits perched on a hill, high above the street. The design captures the sweeping views of the Rainier Valley with floor to ceiling glass while at the same time respecting the privacyof the occupants in adjacent homes. The 3,600 sqft home includes four bedrooms, two and a half baths, and a large open living floor with ten foot-tall ceilings and a two car garage with a 400 sqft roof deck above.

Additionally, the home includes a separate, one bedroom apartment unit on the lower level, complete with a wrap-around patio. The structure was conceived as the juxtaposition of three pure volumes, each containing a unique programmatic element. In turn, each element is clad with clear cedar, cement board or concrete to emphasize the massing.

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New-home construction increased 8.2 percent in April, offering signs of life in a deeply troubled sector, the Commerce Department reported on Friday. But most of the gain came in multifamily housing, masking further bad news on single-family homes, whose groundbreakings dropped to a 17-year low.

Housing starts rose to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.032 million. Construction of multifamily units surged 36 percent, compared with a 35 percent drop in March, a huge swing — and an average one in recent months, the agency said in a report.

While building permits were up 4 percent in both areas, ground was broken on 1.7 percent fewer single-family homes in April, from a seasonally-adjusted annual rate of 704,000 to 692,000.

There were varied reactions to the new figures, with one analyst telling Reuters that “it’s a nice upside surprise” and another telling Bloomberg News that the trends remained “horrific.”

Joel Naroff of Naroff Economic Advisors offered a pragmatic assessment in comments to The Associated Press. “While we may not yet have absolutely hit bottom,” he said, “it is beginning to look as if the end may be near.”

The markets were down slightly in early trading.

“The bump in starts owes entirely to multifamily dwellings,” Michael T. Darda of MKM Partners said. While the single-family figure was certainly bad news, he also said that it “indicates that the builders are rapidly taking supply off the market, which ultimately will lay the foundation for stabilization in the sector.”

The month-to-month figures may have been mixed, but the year-to-year comparisons left no doubt that housing was far from a full recovery. Overall housing starts plunged 30.6 percent compared with those in the month a year earlier, and permits sank by 34.3 percent.

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New Yorkers are reminded fairly frequently that not everyone is hurting from the nation’s housing slump.

Attention-grabbing names like Madonna, Bono and Scarlett are still making multimillion-dollar real estate deals in the city and the media aren’t shy about reporting it.

“It’s certainly amazing how often, just going through city records, [you find] someone with a well-known name is selling an apartment that’s absurdly big and absurdly expensive,” said Max Abelson, who writes a real estate column for The New York Observer, a weekly newspaper.

Abelson’s latest celebrity reports include news that actress Scarlett Johansson sold her Tribeca loft for nearly $1.9 million and that U2 lead singer Bono sold his Central Park West apartment for $4.9 million.

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The weak dollar has made the American real estate market look attractive to foreign bargain hunters.

The U.S. rose to the top of lists of the “most stable and secure” countries for real estate investment and the countries with the best opportunity for appreciation, according to the 16th annual survey of the Association of Foreign Investors in Real Estate (AFIRE)released Jan. 28. New York City and Washington D.C. were the top two global “Cities for Foreign Investors’ Real Estate Dollars,” according to the survey.

China is also growing in popularity. Shanghai rose to No. 5 from No. 9 a year ago on the list of top cities for foreign investment. And China is now No. 2 on the list of countries with the best opportunity for appreciation.

The survey of 200 AFIRE members was conducted in the fourth quarter 2007. AFIRE members hold $700 billion of cross-border real estate, including $230 billion in the U.S.

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By 2012, Borrell’s numbers show real estate advertising online growing by 34% to $3.45 billion. Newspaper’s real estate take will fall 32% to $3.3 billion. And the rest of real estate advertising will grow 10% to $4.46 billion. All told, the five-year outlook for real estate advertising — regardless of the platform — is down 2%. Flat marketing budgets are never a a very bullish signal for any industry.

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The median price of a condo in the nation’s most expensive urban market jumped 5.2 percent from a year earlier to $1.12 million. The price of co-operatives, apartment buildings where residents can impose their own financial requirements on buyers, fell 2.4 percent to $668,500, according to a report today by the real estate data company Radar Logic Inc.

Manhattan is outperforming the national housing market as bonus earners and international investors bid up prices and help the city fend off the housing slump. That trend might be threatened as home loans of more than $417,000 become more expensive and Wall Street executives face the prospect of pay cuts brought on by mortgage-related losses.

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