Millions of borrowers will pay off their mortgages this year. But sending in that last payment is not the end of the line. It's the beginning of the end, perhaps, but not the end itself. So don't burn those mortgage papers just yet.

For starters, call your lender about a month after you've made the final payment to make sure that you have, indeed, satisfied your debt. You may not be as current as you think.

It doesn't happen often, but sometimes a long-ago payment never reached its destination, so you're actually a month behind. Or perhaps a late charge is still outstanding for a payment you forgot to make. Or maybe your escrow account is a little short and there's not enough money for the lender to pay your taxes and insurance one last time.

After your mortgage is paid in full, the lender or the company that services your loan on behalf of the lender will prepare a document known as a "satisfaction of mortgage," to be recorded at the county courthouse.

The satisfaction "piece," as lawyers like to call it, is much like the notice that automobile lenders stamp on the auto titles they return when car loans are paid off. The only difference is that while a lender's rubber-stamp statement is proof enough for most state governments that a car lien has been satisfied, a satisfaction of mortgage is a legal document that must be recorded to be valid and actually release the lien on a property.

Without that last step, title or escrow companies will be unable to verify that a mortgage has been paid off. And if they can't do that, they won't issue a clear title when the owner tries to sell the place, whether that's now or 10 years down the road.

Fortunately, the lien release process usually goes off without a hitch. But once in a while, a release isn't filed or recorded, and a buyer's lender refuses to close. This can hold up a sale for as long as it takes to clear the air, maybe months.

In some cases, the original lender is no longer in business. In others, ownership of a loan has been transferred, sometimes so often that the trail is difficult to trace.

With this in mind, when you call your lender to make sure you've met all your obligations, ask about the procedures regarding the satisfaction document. Most states require lenders to file the release on your behalf, but a few places still allow lenders to hand off this important step to their borrowers.

Either way, the cost usually ranges from $20 to $40, according to Aurora Marsh of Rekon Technologies, a Pasadena, Calif., company that provides lenders with software to electronically create and record lien releases and other documents.

In the do-it-yourself jurisdictions, borrowers sometimes are not told how to proceed, or they simply don't read or understand the instructions. And whether the release is thrown out with that day's mail or filed away for safekeeping, the lien is still there. The loan has been paid in full, but until the release is recorded, the lien is in place.

The process of sending the original release to the county, having it recorded and getting the satisfaction back for your records normally takes 30 days. But it can take up to 60 or even 90 days in jurisdictions that do not accept releases electronically and/or are not otherwise equipped to handle the job.

Marsh says more than 700 of the nation's approximately 3,600 recording districts accept releases electronically from authorized submitters, including title companies. If the process works properly, the submitter should receive electronic confirmation within three business days that the satisfaction has been accepted or rejected.

The most common problem with lien satisfactions is that they don't conform to the recording office's requirements. Perhaps the wording is wrong, the page size is incorrect or the format is not right. Or maybe insufficient fees were submitted with the release.

Another possibility is that the lender's name is incorrect. If the entity signing the release is not the same as the one that put the lien in place, it will be rejected, says Marsh. "Lenders often fail to use the phrase 'formerly known as' when they have acquired the original lender."

If the original lender has been taken over by another institution or has gone out of business, it may become necessary to hire an attorney to create an affidavit on your behalf attesting that the loan has been paid in full to present to a judge.

Or the escrow or title company can create and sign a release when the lender is unable to do so. In California, for example, if the escrow company does not hear back from the lender after 75 days, it is allowed to create a release on its own.

Often, though, the title company has enough internal capabilities to trace your loan's lineage, from one lender to another or one servicer to another. Usually, the history can be found right away, but sometimes it can take weeks or even months.

If your lender was a now-defunct bank or savings institution, you might be able to find your loan's current owner on the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. website (www.fdic.gov), which maintains a list of all failed banks and the investors that acquired their assets.

If the way to a man's heart is through his stomach, can builders and developers land homebuyers via the same route?

That may be something of a stretch, but food-related amenities are fast becoming a way to make today's new home communities stand out from the competition.

For example, a few years ago, developers would have asked authorities to chase away any food truck that set up shop near their community centers. And if a homeowner turned his backyard into a farm, the community association probably would have objected.

Now, mobile dining and urban agriculture are the rage, and forward-thinking developers are welcoming vendors and gardeners as part of their amenity packages. Call these new edible community features "gastronomic extras."

Mobile kitchens are helping to energize many downtown markets at lunchtime, and they can do the same at master planned communities, according to panelists who shared their best ideas on what it will take to succeed at a recent Urban Land Institute (ULI) conference.

Mobile vending used to be the sole purview of ice cream trucks and food and vegetable wagons. But now, a wide variety of gourmet and ethnic meals are being served from vans and even pickup trucks.

These meals-on-wheels are welcome not only at lunchtime but also in the late afternoon -- say, just after school -- or any other regularly scheduled time, such as during sporting events.

"Creative retail is a wonderful thing," said Theresa Frankiewicz, vice president of community development at Crown Community Development of Naperville, Ill.

Just as hot as mobile dining is urban farming. In fact, agriculture is supplanting golf courses as today's must-have amenity, said Randal Jackson, president of The Planning Center/DC&E, a consulting firm headquartered in Santa Ana, Calif.

One good thing about gardening is that developers don't have to devote big acreage to it, which is important with today's downsized projects. Whereas golf courses can easily gobble up a couple of hundred acres, community garden plots may require as little as an acre.

Some builders are offering storage sheds, arbors, greenhouses and even vegetable beds as options. One well-stocked backyard garden can produce enough produce to feed the entire block, according to one ULI panelist.

Following the same food-based theme, Adam McAbee of John Burns Real Estate Consulting in Irvine, Calif., recently noticed a couple of attention-grabbing features that are intended to stick in visitors' minds long after they've left the premises.

One, in a San Diego market with a predominantly Asian buyer profile, was a wok kitchen, offered as an "extended prep" area off the main kitchen. Another was a sales office that looked decidedly like a French countryside cafe, where prospects could linger and sip coffee.

Creating a social infrastructure has long been as important to developers as streets and sewers. But nowadays, that means going beyond intranet systems and clubs, especially if the property is large enough to support retail and commercial components.

Anything that gives a project a sense of place and encourages social interaction will create value, the ULI panelists stressed. It could be a trout stream, such as the one running through a Salt Lake City project, or a riverside park, such as the one below a spaghetti freeway in Houston.

One of the best tools for bringing people together is restaurants, according to developers. "You buy a couch once every 10 years, but you eat three times a day," said Jonathan Brinsden of Midway Development, the developer of the CityCentre mixed-use property built on an old mall site in Houston.

Other people magnets are athletic clubs and hotels, if the properties are large enough to support them.

"Athletic facilities are part of our daily lives now," Brinsden said. "And public spaces are so ingrained in our DNA that they are the most valuable acres in our project."

Todd Meyer of the SWA Group, a worldwide planning, urban design and landscape architecture firm, agreed.

"People like to get out and enjoy open spaces," he said. "They are great gathering spots anybody can walk to at any time. But they can't be sterile or boring. People need to have things to do, so create the kind of venue where people like to mix with each other."

But the project doesn't have to be big to be bountiful. Take Taxi, a 20-acre live-work-play property being built on the site of an old taxi garage just outside downtown Denver.

As relatively small as it is -- six buildings with 25,000 square feet of commercial and residential space -- about 400 people work for more than 80 different companies at Taxi. Occasional seating and dining areas can be found along the halls, which are called streets.

The two-story, low-rise project is a place where the younger generation can escape the high-rise culture and express themselves, said longtime Denver developer Morton "Mickey" Zeppelin.

"It's sort of like not having to make your bed in the morning when mom isn't home," he said.

The housing recovery is well under way, according to the latest and best indicator of house prices. And it's more widespread than ever.

Prices on a per-square-foot basis are up in 86 of the nation's 109 most-active "core-based statistical areas," according to data collected as of Nov. 1 by Pro Teck Valuation Services of Waltham, Mass.

Uncle Sam defines a CBSA as a geographic "micropolitan" area of at least 10,000 people who are tied to an urban center by commuting. In nearly a fifth of the nation's CBSAs, prices are absolutely booming, rising by double digits.

Year over year, the median price of a house in the Phoenix-Mesa-Glendale market in Arizona was up a whopping 35.82 percent per square foot as of Nov. 1. At the same time, the median in Cape Coral-Fort Myers, Fla., was up 25.11 percent per square foot. And it was up 22.3 percent in Tucson, Ariz.

Price per square foot is a better standard on which to judge the trajectory of housing prices because it adjusts for product mix. Other measures are influenced by the number of sales. And too many deals in one price bracket or another can produce a false reading.

For example, if there are an inordinate number of high-end sales during the period studied, the average price of all the houses sold -- or even the median -- will appear much higher than it really is. An unusually large number of sales at the low end will produce a figure that is too low.

But the median square-foot price tends to even things out. By "normalizing" for swings in the type and size of houses sold, it represents a truer picture of the market.

Pro Teck's figures also are more current and detailed than any of the other indexes you might hear or read about. Whereas the others are often three months old -- and some may be an ancient six months late -- Pro Teck's figures are updated at least daily from 850 multiple listing services nationwide. And because the sources of the data are so widespread, the Massachusetts company's figures are more detailed, drilling down, down, down to the ZIP code and even neighborhood level, where they are most helpful.

National numbers are great for headlines, but they don't tell buyers and sellers what's going on where they live. Even on a square-foot basis, national numbers are all but meaningless.

For example, the mythical cost per square foot nationally is $90. That's an increase of 4.5 percent, from $84 as of Nov. 1, 2011. But that means little. After all, who lives in Nationally, USA?

Isn't it better to know that in the last year, the median price of houses in the North Port-Bradenton-Sarasota portion of southwest Florida where you reside -- or want to reside -- rose 10.4 percent per square foot? Armed with that kind of information, you'd know that if you wanted to buy a 3,000-square-foot house in Sarasota, you could expect to pay roughly $3,000 more.

Southwest Florida is just one of 20 CBSAs where prices have increased by double digits in the last year. Many of those were hit hardest during the downturn. Now they are recovering at a rather fast clip, probably because most of the foreclosures have been lapped up by bargain hunters and investors.

Whether they continue to do well will depend on two things: when would-be sellers decide that prices have risen enough for them to actually put their homes on the market, thereby relieving some of the pressure on supply, and whether there is an abundance of still-to-be-foreclosed houses, the so-called shadow inventory, waiting in the wings.

For the most part, increases in per-square-foot prices tend to correlate well with median prices. But not always.

In the Detroit-Livonia-Dearborn, Mich., CBSA, for example, the median price per square foot was up 16.85 percent from Nov. 1 a year ago. The median price of houses sold in the Detroit market during the same period was up 16.58 percent.

But in the Bethesda-Rockville-Frederick CBSA in Maryland just outside of Washington, D.C., the median price of homes sold was up 4.74 percent, whereas the median price per square foot was up 12.44 percent, an almost threefold difference.

Some of the more noteworthy gains in the last year include the Las Vegas-Paradise CBSA in Nevada, where the median price per square foot is up 10.76 percent, from $67 to $75. In West Palm Beach-Boca Raton-Boynton Beach, Fla., the median rose 13.5 percent per square foot, from $95 to $108.

The price trend in the Boston area, on the other hand, has remained essentially flat over the last 12 months. In the Boston-Quincy CBSA, the square foot price did not move from $189. In the Peabody and Springfield CBSAs, it dipped $1, from $182 to $181 and $126 to $125, respectively. And in Worcester, Mass., it was down $3, from $132 to $129.

Nationally, the most expensive houses are in the San Francisco-San Mateo-Redwood City CBSA, where the median price per square foot is $472, up 8.15 percent from $437 a year ago. But another Northern California CBSA -- San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara -- isn't far behind at $457 a foot, a 19.65 percent jump from $382.

At the other end of the price spectrum, the least expensive market of the 109 most active is the Detroit CBSA, where the median price per foot is a mere $51. The next cheapest CBSA is Palm Bay-Melbourne-Titusville, Fla., at $56 a square foot.

Top 10 Price Gains (median price per square foot)

Nov. 1, 2011 Nov. 1, 2012 Percentage change

Phoenix-Mesa-Glendale AZ $65 $88 35.82

Cape Coral-Fort Myers FL 58 73 25.11

Tucson AZ 75 91 22.3

San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara CA 382 457 19.65

Boise City-Nampa ID 72 84 17.18

Detroit-Livonia-Dearborn MI 44 51 16.85

Oakland-Fremont-Hayward CA 214 249 16.18

Warren-Troy-Farmington Hills MI 69 79 13.57

West Palm Beach-Boca Raton-Boynton Beach FL 95 108 13.7

Fayetteville-Springdale-Rogers AR 69 78 13.22

Source: Pro Teck Valuation Services