Despite the increases, prices nationwide are still about 30 percent below the peak they reached at the height of the housing bubble in the summer of 2006.

WSJ: US home prices accelerate in November

While working towards his graduate degree he had the good fortune of landing a summer job at EA during the height of the gaming explosion in Seattle.

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But at the height of the market in the summer of 2006, they made a final decision to go rental, foreseeing that the city was about to be flooded with thousands of new condo units, according to Susi Yu, a senior vice president with the developer.

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His father was a British consul in Moscow in 1935-38, and Norman's summer holidays from school were spent there at the height of Stalin's purges.

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