Weekly Roundup: All signs point to strengthening market in NYC and U.S., owners of luxury homes gild lillies, lighthouse in Chesapeake Bay for sale

Number of Manhattan properties under contract soars, inventory plummets during 2012

Q4 Brooklyn prices post biggest year-over-year price gain since 2006, while Queens median climbs 14 percent

Bars, restaurants and grocery stores can hurt quality of life, resales for residents of apartment buildings

Foreclosures mushroom in Queens, grow somewhat in Staten Island and the Bronx, slide in Brooklyn and Manhattan

Astronaut resists aiming for moon in putting Los Angeles condo on the market

Former baseball star lists sprawling Beverly Hills estate for $25 million

Actors who split in 2011 finally selling their UES triplex, for $9.25 million

TV judge lists Midtown pied-à-terre for $9 million — yes, for a pied-à-terre!

Estate of acerbic intellectual sells Chelsea penthouse to seven-time Emmy winner

Filmmaker offers Greenwich Village co-op for sale but plans no move to North Dakota

At 4.2 million, home sales

A bombshell calling ‘the bottom’ lands online

Housing starts (Click to expand via Calculated Risk)

Bill McBride, who is a highly respected blogger on finance and economics, lobbed a bombshell the other day that has been predictably controversial.

On CalculatedRisk.com — which I check two or three times a day for his latest news, information and insights on real estate — the full-time blogger declared the following:

The Housing Bottom Is Here

He contended that

Weekly Roundup: Not 1 word about that wedding

Here’s your chance to catch up with news included to inform, enlighten and perhaps even entertain you. To read about The Big Apple, check out the other of today’s posts and look for Out and About early next week.

Actress joins others in firing bullets into landlord’s market-value rents

Her purchase in Greenwich Village proves that it pays to have friends

Fated forever to be “daughter of,” a lesser light sells her apartment for a pretty penny

Big Apple deserter and football Hall of Famer puts Dakota co-op on the market

Jeans heirs seek to sell $60 million summer place, and loud mouth takes a loss in Connecticut

Builders see little relief from sluggish market

No wonder: March sales

Case can’t predict, and Times gets NYC wrong

Karl Case, whose name is practically immortalized as co-creator of the Case-Shiller Index, said in September that he thought the housing market may be near a bottom.

In a paper he presented at the Brookings Institution, the Wellesley emeritus professor of economics observed that nine of 20 metro areas had shown price improvement and the relationship between incomes and house prices was nearing a level that occurred at the end of previous housing downturns.

In the New York Times that same month, he wrote that “housing has perhaps never been a better bargain.”

That was September, you might note, so why take issue with him? One reason would be