New York  - The Beijing Vantone Real Estate Company planned to sign Thursday a lease for five floors in the new World Trade Center's Freedom Tower, making it the building's first corporate tenant, news reports said.

The US government and New York City's agencies have all agreed to lease space in the 592-meter tower, which is being built on the same land where the original twin towers were destroyed by terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

Washington  - The construction of new homes in the United States unexpectedly surged in February, the Commerce Department said Tuesday, signalling that the housing downturn at the heart of the US economic crisis may finally have reached bottom.

Privately-owned housing starts in February were 583,000 at an annual rate, up 22 per cent from January but still down 47.3 per cent from the same month in 2008. Economists had expected a further monthly decline to 450,000 last month, according to a Bloomberg News survey.

Kiev  - The German real estate developer ECE Projektmanagement on Tuesday announced it was shutting down its operation in the former Soviet republic Ukraine, the Interfax news agency reported.

ECE Ukraine, the branch office of the Hamburg-headquartered company, will close its doors for good by March's end with all staff sacked, according to the report.

The company was freezing all operations in Ukraine for the "indefinite future", according to a statement.

On Wednesday, Statistics Canada reported that Contractors' selling prices for new homes decreased by 0.6 per cent between December and January.

The largest decreases were noticed in the cities of Western Canada. The rate of decrease in January was somewhat faster than the 0.1 per cent drop registered in the preceding month. At that time the prices dropped 2.8 per cent in Edmonton, 2.1 per cent in Calgary, 1.1 per cent in Victoria and 0.7 per cent in Vancouver.

Washington  - The number of US households in some stage of foreclosure rose nearly 30 per cent in February from a year earlier despite government efforts aimed at keeping people in their homes, according to data released Thursday.

Foreclosures rose 6 per cent from January with 290,631 properties - one in every 440 homes - having received notice from their banks or being in some stage of the foreclosure process in February, industry tracker RealtyTrac said in a monthly report.

Washington  - Lenders are taking back homes in the United States at a record pace as families can't afford mortgage payments, according to an industry report Thursday indicating the country's housing crisis deepened further at the end of last year.

The Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) said 3.3 per cent of all mortgage-holders were in foreclosure at the end of 2008 - up 126 per cent from a year ago - and 7.88 per cent were behind on at least one monthly payment.

Both numbers were the highest ever recorded since MBA's records began in 1972.