Builder confidence in the market for newly built, single-family homes rose one point in August to its highest level in more than a year, according to the latest reading of the National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index (HMI), released today. Building on a two-point gain in July, the HMI reached 18 this month, its highest point since June of 2008.

Sales of existing homes and condos continue to power the real estate market, in some areas they're up by double digits, and despite all the negative headlines about foreclosures, even prices are rising in many places as well.

After being blamed for helping to inflate home values during the housing boom, the appraisal business is again coming under fire.

It often seems as though men and women are from different planets, but every day millions of couples navigate through day-to-day and even life-altering decisions. Because a home is the biggest purchase most people will make in their lifetime, Coldwell Banker Real Estate LLC surveyed 1,000 individuals to discover how much men and women differ in the home-buying process.

The House and Senate may have left Capitol Hill for their August break, but housing lobbyists are busy at work gearing up a major campaign to extend the $8,000 home buyer tax credit.

TV and film actor J.K. Simmons of the police drama "The Closer" and the "Spider-Man" movies and his actress wife, Michelle Schumacher, have put their Hollywood Hills-area contemporary on the market at $1,795,000.

"Weeds" writer and executive producer Jenji Kohan and her husband, Christopher Noxon, have listed their Spanish-style home in Los Feliz at $1,597,000.

'A man is not a whole and complete man," wrote Walt Whitman, "unless he owns a house and the ground it stands on." America's lesser bards sang of "my old Kentucky Home" and "Home Sweet Home," leading no less than that great critic Herbert Hoover to declaim that their ballads "were not written about tenements or apartments…they never sing about a pile of rent receipts." To own a home is to be American. To rent is to be something less.