Fortunately February was a short month, otherwise there'd be a lot more hangovers from all the celebrating.

Scarcely more than a few days went by in February without good news flowing in on almost every aspect of the industry, making it all the more painful waiting for the other shoe to drop.

"It just can't keep going like this," became the common refrain as experts time and again saw their skepticism rewarded with new, record-high performance numbers.

It became official Feb. 1 -- 1998 was the best year in history for the new single-family home market. The U.S. Census Bureau reported that sales of new single-family homes hit a a new high last year of 888,000, well over the previous high set in 1977 of 819,000, right as Baby Boomers were getting into the housing market. In December alone, sales came in at an annualized rate of 978,000, down 3.6 percent from November's all-time high of 1.015 million.

"We have been looking at strong sales for a while," said Fred Breimyer, chief economist at State Street Bank and Trust Co. in Boston. "Most of our indicators are telling us that people are still in the mood to buy."

Meanwhile, good news for the online lending community came in the form of analyst's predictions of flashfire growth in the number of buyers who will conduct their mortgage transaction online.

An electronic-commerce analyst for Deustche Bank Securities of New York told the Wall Street Journal that he estimates that mortgages originated on-line last year account for less than 1% of all mortgages originated in 1998. But that minuscule percentage, analyst James Marks says, is still a ten-figure dollar number -- about $4.2 billion.

And while few analysts of any stripe expect that e-commerce will replace face-to-face transactions, many are saying they expect more people will see online mortgages as a convenient way to comparison shop and possibly get better deals.

Marks, meanwhile, predicted to the Journal that if the housing industry keeps burning as hot as it has and growth continues at its current pace, mortgages originated online could reach $60 billion in 2000.

Of course, it's not like February was a bed of roses all around.

A study first published on Real Times in February showed that the listing claims on leading real estate websites are vastly inflated. Researchers for Clareity Consulting, an MLS consulting firm, had performed a manual property listing "audit" of four of the largest real estate advertising sites on the Internet -- RealSelect's Realtor.com, Moore Data's Cyberhomes, HomeSeekers.com, and Microsoft's HomeAdvisor.

That audit initially found all four sites inflated the number of listings they carried by from anywhere from 8% to 170%, although the HomeSeekers.com numbers are being revised.

According to the study, Realtor.com's numbers were most accurate. The site boasts more than 1.3 million homes for sale, but Clareity only found 1,202,677, which the company then confirmed. Microsoft's HomeAdvisor listings were inflated by more than 170%, the study alleged. HomeAdvisor claims 500,000, but Clareity only showed 186,873 listings.

Microsoft disputes the Clareity results. HomeAdvisor spokesmen point out their 500,000 number claim is based on a number of agreements they have recently signed, and therefore not all listings due are available on-line, although they will be added soon. Cyberhomes boasted 650,000 listings, or 100% more, prior to the audit than Clareity found, which was only 335,847. Cyberhomes afterward provided Clareity with a listing count of 360,000, pointing out many more were being added.

Of course, whether consumers get their mortgages online or the old-fashioned way, they are getting them. Another study published in February showed that Americans are buying larger homes with more amenities at prices that have increased less than the rate of inflation over the past two decades.

The average size of a new single-family home was 2,150 square feet in 1998, the best year ever for housing. That's 22.5 percent larger than the typical home built 20 years earlier, according to the Commerce Department.

While the median new home price rose to $151,127 last year -- almost three times as much as in 1978 -- the per-square foot price rose at only a 4.6 percent rate during that period. That's less than the 5.1 percent annualized increase in the consumer price index over the 20 years, government statistics show.

"It's striking," said Michael Carliner, an economist at the National Association of Home Builders. "Once you adjust for size and quality improvements, there's been little increase in house prices."

And what month would be complete without a few market performance reports that still have the experts scratching their noggins?

Defying predictions for a gradual slowdown, new home sales and existing home sales both saw an increase in January.

New home and apartment starts climbed 3.8 percent over the previous month, setting the highest rate in over a decade. The gain was largely due to increased production in the South and in the apartment sector.

Single-family housing starts rose 1.2 percent to a 1.39 million-unit rate, while multifamily starts rose 13.9 percent to a 410,000-unit rate.

"In the first month of this year, single-family home production was running at its highest annual rate since February of 1984,'' said Charlie Ruma, a home builder from Columbus, Ohio, and president of the National Association of Home Builders. "Some slowing of the market is likely as the year progresses, but for now, our builder surveys and the latest government figures tell us that inventories are low, demand for new housing is high, and on the multifamily side, vacancy rates have improved.''

Sales of existing single-family homes in January rose above the previous month’s record high rate, the National Association of Realtors reported, climbing to an annual sales rate of 5.07 million units in January. That's 16 percent from the rate of 4.37 million units recorded a year ago. The January rate rose 0.8 percent from the December figure of 5.03 million units -- a record-high seasonally adjusted annual sales rate.

The national median price for existing, single-family homes was $131,700, up 4.4 percent from $126,100 posted a year ago. The median is a midpoint -- half the homes sell for more, half for less.

But there's still a few gray clouds on the horizon, and the groundwork is being laid for a slowdown, experts noted in February.

Despite the generally good economic news and record-high housing sales and starts reports in the housing industry, there's trouble developing. Entry-level homebuyers are being put through the affordability wringer again as lot and land prices continue to escalate across the United States.

Subdivisions selling single-family housing within the means of young families -- and within reasonable range of employment centers -- are becoming harder to find. The expense of buying and developing underlying ground drives the ground prices of the finished houses higher.

If not for the long-streak of historic-low mortgage rates, many younger buyers would not qualify for the loans they need to buy these ever-more-expensive entry-level homes.

In the booming metro areas -- Dallas, Atlanta, Raleigh, Las Vegas, San Diego, among others -- where builders have reaped the benefits of this extended housing growth cycle, demand for finished homesites has outrun land development.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, hundreds of thousands of younger homebuyers were shut out of the market as high mortgage rates and an inflationary economy drove housing process to prohibitive levels. Today, many analysts say, expensive lots are threatening to do the same.

"Homebuilders addressing the low-end market are doing what they can to wring extra costs out of their products, but the basic cost they cannot contain is the rising price of developed land," said Brian Bragg, an analyst and editor with U.S. Housing Markets.

As the pressure on urban infrastructure grows, the costs of developing land can only go up, he said. Road traffic has become a disaster in many markets, leading to development moratoriums, low-density zoning, impact fees and onerous development requirements.

And finally, all that building is putting a labor strain on the construction business.

"It's two problems, really," said Gopal Ahluwalia, director of research for the National Association of Home Builders. "A shortage of skilled labor for one, which is affecting both the time it takes to complete a home and the cost."

The residential construction boom -- the kind developers and builders haven't seen since the real estate feast of the mid-1980s -- is fueling skyrocketing labor costs due to a shortage of skilled trade workers and pushing up materials costs.

"It's all the skilled trades," Ahluwalia said. "Carpenters, electricians, plumbers ... the shortage adds to the cost of building a home, and when the home has already been pre-sold, it eats into profits for the builders."