They’re back: Massive homes, heavy on square footage and sometimes light on architectural style, are seeing a resurgence in certain Boston-area communities.

Home sales beat expectations in April, in part due to a now-expired homebuyer tax credit and low mortgage rates. Sales of previously owned homes rose 7.6 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 5.77 million, according to a report out this week by the National Association of Realtors. And mortgage rates have dropped to their lowest point so far this year, according to loan giant Freddie Mac. So is the housing market finally recovering?

So you want to get in the real estate game while rates are low and affordable property is abundant? Before you hop on the gravy train, be wary of the fine print. As part of our weeklong series on Life in Fine Print, we talk with Dan Green, loan officer at Waterstone Mortgage and author of themortgagereports.com. He explains why all those ads promising low APRs and fantastic terms might be concealing a slightly more complicated truth.

It may not be that easy to find a mall to go hang out and shop anymore. General Growth Properties, one of the biggest mall operators in the country, filed for bankruptcy yesterday. And we are seeing more and more malls die out. In fact as our next guest wrote in The New York Times earlier this month, no new malls have been built in the U.S. since 2006. So what is happening to the mall? And what should happen to the near empty malls now littering the American landscape? To help answer that question, The Takeaway is joined by Ellen Dunham-Jones, Director of the Architecture Program at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the co-author of Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs.

Read the New York Times article, 101 Uses for a Deserted Mall, including a contribution from our guest Ellen Dunham-Jones.

How I Met Your Mother's Robin Sparkles knows how to love a mall:

Even for people who work in the real estate markets every day it is hard to tell what way the housing market is heading. New-home construction held steady at almost 11 percent in March, according to government data released yesterday. But foreclosures are up, with nearly 804,000 homes getting a notice in just the first three months of this year. That's a 24 percent increase compared to the same time last year. But other analysts are seeing hope and some first time homebuyers are finding themselves in great positions to buy.

To help us parse the numbers we turned to two experts: Behrooz Shahidi, a realtor in New Jersey, and Michael Corkery, housing reporter for The Wall Street Journal.

This week, we sent Senior Editor Femi Oke out to bring your stories about the economic crisis back to the show. Sam Jordan was listening in New Jersey and sent us an e-mail. He wanted us to meet a real estate broker who he describes as more or less his real estate hero. Not something you hear about brokers these days, so Femi Oke went and got the story. She found a broker who, even during the height of the real estate boom and easy mortgages, preached caution and budgetary restraint. He lost clients over his moderation and colleagues laughed, but that real estate philosophy saved families, like Sam Jordan's, from mortgage overload. Femi joins us now with the story.

The Takeaway's videographer Jennifer Hsu captured the action on film:

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An uptick in new and existing home sales across the country has real estate watchers and economists hoping that the housing market might have finally hit bottom, especially in the South and West regions of the nation. In the South, new home sales rose almost 10% in February, compared to January, and in the West the rise was 6.6%. Joining The Takeaway are two real estate brokers, Ed Snively of El Centro, California, and Ryan Ward of Atlanta, Georgia who have been riding the tumultuous waves of the housing market in both of those regions.

Two major economic indicators are released today: the numbers for new and existing home sales for November. Together, the numbers are expected to indicate the economy is worsening. Chip Case, the co-producer of the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index, joins The Takeaway to talk about how the housing market is the backbone of the American economy and if there is a prospect for good news in real estate.

"I don't think we're close to a bottom now."
-- Dr. Richard K. Green on the housing market

"Americans are at the bottom of the developed world in how much we save."
--Ronald Wilcox on American debt