Building sites for single-family houses hit a record high last year, even as lots were the smallest ever, according to data from the Census Bureau’s Survey of Construction.

The median lot size sold in 2016 dipped to 8,562 square feet, or just under a fifth of an acre. That’s a small decline from 2015, when the median fell to under 8,600 square feet for the first time.

While lot sizes are shrinking overall, regional differences are major. For example, the median size of a fully developed building site in New England, which is known for strict, low-density zoning rules, is nearly twice as large as the national median -- exceeding a third of an acre. The Pacific division, where densities are high and developed land is scarce, has the smallest lots, with half of the lots under 0.15 acres.

The lot size analysis, which was made by economists at the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), does not include custom homes built on the owner’s land.

Price-wise, half the lots nationwide were priced at or above $45,000, a value first reached in 2015. Before that, the previous record was the $43,000 posted in 2006, in the midst of the housing boom -- two years before the market came apart at the seams.

Rising costs are most pronounced in the West South Central and North Central divisions, where lot prices hit a new high. Half the building sites in these regions sold for more than $47,000 last year. In the boom years of the previous decade, the median lot price for these two divisions was under $30,000.

Given that lot sizes continue to shrink and housing production is still significantly below historically normal levels, building sites are still being sold at record-high prices.

Despite the record-high lot prices, they accounted for less than 17 percent of sale prices of new single-family homes started in 2016, which is the lowest share since at least 1999. The declining share suggests that other construction costs, including labor and materials, are outpacing rising lot values.

Meanwhile, despite smaller lots, builders are managing to make their backyards larger, according to research from online real estate brokerage Trulia. The typical house completed so far this year included 7,048 square feet of outdoor space, marking the third year in a row yard sizes have grown. The trend breaks a 25-year run toward smaller outdoor spaces.

Yard sizes are increasing because the footprints of the houses themselves are shrinking, as builders try to cut costs by making their houses smaller. At the same time, buyers are demanding better-designed outdoor spaces.

Water is not everyone’s cup of tea. But if it’s a water view you crave, be ready to pay for it. Handily.

According to Miami agent Ross Milroy, who specializes in properties priced at $2 million and above, some condominiums that feature a direct water view sell for as much as twice the price of a comparable unit that looks over the city.

Not surprisingly, the biggest price discrepancy can be found on South Beach, where condos with a direct view of the ocean or bay bring $1,950 per square foot, while the same unit that overlooks the city sells for $970 per square foot -- a difference of 101 percent.

Water view premiums can be found throughout Miami at buildings adjacent to the ocean, Biscayne Bay and even the Miami River. At Ten Museum Park, a 50-story condo in downtown Miami, comparable condos are listed for sale at $1.1 million for water view and $759,000 for city view -- a 49 percent difference.

Of course, people’s desire to live near the water is nothing new. “Buyers want to see the ocean, hear the water, feel the ocean breeze, and have a seamless experience of bringing the outdoors in,” says Milroy.

Folks trying to raise their credit scores often resort to tactics that make sense intuitively, but sometimes backfire. For instance: Many think that closing unused cards will help their scores. But it could do the opposite.

The reason is tied to an important metric in credit scoring systems called the debt-to-limit ratio, or “revolving utilization.” This metric compares your existing credit card balances to the combined credit card limits on all of your open cards.

So, if you have $2,000 in balances on your cards compared with $10,000 in the combined limits on your cards, your debt-to-limit ratio is 20 percent because you’re using 20 percent of your aggregate credit limit. Twenty percent is a pretty low ratio -- a good thing for your credit score.

Closing one or two unused credit cards would remove some percentage of the “limit” portion of the debt-to-limit ratio measurement. Let’s say the card you closed had a $5,000 credit limit. That would leave a $2,000 balance owed and only $5,000 for your total spending limit, which instantly doubles your debt-to-limit ratio to 40 percent.

Even closing cards that represent a smaller percentage of your total debt limit would drive that ratio higher.

Now apply this knowledge to the holiday shopping season and the bills that follow. Seasonal gift-buying typically brings an increase in outstanding card balances -- pushing up the “debt” side of the ratio. Closing one or more unused cards in the wake of that would lower the “limit” side of the ratio at the same time: a one-two punch that could decrease credit scores considerably.

If your house is damaged in a fire, hurricane, flood or other disaster, you should call your insurance company first thing. But after that, call your local appraiser’s office.

If you do, the value of your property could be reduced appreciably in the tax man’s eye, and as a result, your property tax could go down significantly. If you don’t, “your house could be assessed as if it were in normal condition, despite thousands in diminished market value,” says Patrick O’Connor, president of O’Connor and Associates, one of the country’s largest tax consulting firms.

For example, in the Houston area, a call to the appropriate taxing authority by someone whose house was damaged by Hurricane Harvey won’t change this year’s tax bill because it is based on property values as of Jan. 1, 2017 -- before the big flood. But next year’s appraisals will be based on values as of Jan. 1, 2018, which means next year’s appraisals will reflect damage from Harvey.

Reporting the damage before the date of valuation will give owners a chance to ensure their property value is based on the impact of the disaster, says O’Connor, with the result being a lower value notice and a lower point to begin negotiations for a tax reduction.

Say the house was worth $500,000 before the flood, but is now worth $230,000 because of damage from the disaster. If the county appraiser knows that, he or she can reduce the valuation appropriately. But if he or she isn’t aware -- and most local tax officials don’t visit every house in their districts every year -- your tax bill will be based on the value before the flood, rather than after.

O’Connor says most people are unaware that they can cut their tax bills if their homes are damaged during a disaster such as the Northern California fires, or the hurricanes that blasted the Gulf Coast, much of Florida and all of Puerto Rico. But they can do so, if they are proactive.

Each of the country’s thousands of counties and cities has its own system for valuing property. When disaster strikes, some take the bull by the horns on assessing damage; others don’t have the resources, so they rely on self-reporting. Whether your taxing agency is on the ball or not, O’Connor says you should call just the same to make sure it is aware your place has lost value.

Incidently, some states, including Texas, require that when you put a previously flooded house on the market, you must tell would-be buyers of that fact.

To obtain the most relief, owners usually need to document the condition of their houses when they suffered damage and again at year’s end, when they should report what repairs have been made (if any) and what still needs to be done.

The downside to this, of course, is that there’s a good possibility that after you rebuild, you could end up with a higher assessed value. If you upgraded the place after a flood with new appliances, cabinets, flooring and so on, it is going to be worth more than before the disaster.

Also, whether you were insured or not when the tornado, hurricane or flood struck, you may be eligible for a federal income tax refund as a result of the damage. “Getting a refund is going to be the fastest way most people can get cash to rebuild,” O’Connor advises.

An IRS provision called Section 165 allows for a deduction as a result of casualty losses. That can include shipwrecks, plane crashes and train wrecks, as well as the more common disasters that cause a rapid change in value.

Generally, according to the IRS, you can deduct casualty and theft losses relating to your home, household items and vehicles on your federal income tax return if they are related to a federally declared disaster. But you can’t write off such losses if they are covered by insurance -- unless you file a timely claim for reimbursement and you reduce the loss by the amount of any reimbursement or expected reimbursement.

If your property is personal-use property or isn’t completely destroyed, the amount of your casualty loss is the lesser of the adjusted basis of your property, or the decrease in fair market value.

“Casualty losses are generally deductible in the year the casualty occurred,” reads a page on the topic at IRS.gov. “However, if you have a casualty loss from a federally declared disaster that occurred in an area warranting public or individual assistance (or both), you can choose to treat the casualty loss as having occurred in the year immediately preceding the tax year in which the disaster happened, and you can deduct the loss on your return or amended return for that preceding tax year.”

Back to that example above: The house was worth $500,000 but now is worth just $230,000. That gives the owner a $270,000 tax deduction that can be used on the 2017 federal tax return or on last year’s return.

If you elect to amend your 2016 return, says O’Connor, you can get a significant refund “in about a month.” Assuming the owner in this example is in the 25 percent tax bracket, the $270,000 deduction would generate a $65,000 refund, he says.

Another way to get cash quickly is a loan from the Small Business Administration (SBA). Normally, the SBA makes loans to businesses, but after a named disaster, it makes low-interest loans -- currently 1.75 percent amortized over 30 years -- to individuals as well.

O’Connor says, “it is not possible to find such attractive terms from traditional lenders.”

Loans to individuals are capped at $200,000 for rebuilding and $40,000 for personal property such as autos, clothing and tools. Unlike a tax refund, though, the SBA loan must be repaid.

More than 1 million senior homeowners have now taken out reverse mortgages. There’s a good chance you might, too, once you reach age 62. But the question of how to use the money from the loan is just as important as the question of whether or not to get the loan in the first place.

A laundry list of celebrity spokespeople have tried to explain how these “backwards” loans work. Here’s how the most recent one -- gravelly voiced actor Tom Selleck -- explains it in a commercial for a reverse lender: “A reverse mortgage loan is a simple idea really -- you turn your home’s equity into cash and you pay it back when you leave the house.”

Reverse mortgages are making a comeback from their hottest years in 2007, ‘08 and ’09, when more than 100,000 loans were made every year. According to the National Reverse Mortgage Lenders Association (NRMLA), 45,000 of these home equity conversion mortgages have been recorded so far in fiscal 2017, most of them through the Federal Housing Administration.

That tips the total to over 1 million since the first ones were originated back in 1990. There’s a good bit of equity to tap, too: NRMLA puts total equity for homeowners 62 and older at $6.3 trillion as of the first quarter of this year.

How much can you get with this type of loan? It depends on a number of factors, but it could be as much as 50 percent of the built-up equity in your home.

What to do with the money? You could always take it to Vegas and bet it all on red. But there are a lot of better ways to use the proceeds. NRMLA recently devoted an issue of its magazine, Reverse Mortgage, to the topic. They advertised 25 ways to use your home equity, with a few extra ideas thrown in for good measure.

NRMLA members were asked by the magazine how their clients put their money to use. Many of the answers are pretty obvious: Pay down debt, replace a salary, pay off a first mortgage, send a grandchild to college. But others are pretty clever.

One of the biggest fears about reverses is that they are just another way for the bank to repossess your house. Or as Selleck puts it, “Like you, I thought that reverse mortgages had to have some kind of catch -- just a way for banks to get your house. Right?”

They’re not, as the commercial assures. But in fact, foreclosures are possible with reverse mortgages if the owner-borrower doesn’t maintain the property or pay the taxes and insurance. So one use for the money is to create a set-aside fund to pay the taxes and insurance.

“One of the heaviest burdens for older homeowners is paying property taxes and insurance,” notes Jon Maiolatesi, a loan officer with 1st Financial Reverse Mortgages in Michigan. He describes an older couple living on Social Security: “The monthly budget was tight, but they made it work from month to month. However, twice a year when the property tax and insurance bills arrived, there was often not enough in the checking account to cover them.”

When the couple pursued a reverse mortgage, they found they could arrange for a Life Expectancy Set-Aside (LESA) to pay the taxes and insurance. Funding the LESA does reduce the balance of funds available to you immediately, but it also prevents foreclosure.

Here’s another smart idea: People who take out reverse mortgages generally want to stay in the house a long time, since they have to repay the loan once they move out (or once the home is no longer their principal residence). So why not use the proceeds to redesign your living space to make it responsive to your needs as you age?

Pete Mendenhall, a sales director at Liberty Home Equity Solutions in Coppell, Texas, tells of a widow whose home needed a lot of repairs, even before it could be retrofitted for things like grab-bars and wider doorways.

“Universal design updates allowed (the client) to live more comfortably, with increased wheelchair mobility, and to age in place with dignity. Universal design and other types of upgrades would also help with resale value when the time comes.”

Proceeds can also be used to build living space for an aging parent or a caretaker. You can even use the money to buy a new home.

Dennis Loxton, a sales manager with Liberty in Fort Wayne, Indiana, says one of his borrowers used her equity to do what’s called a “HECM for Purchase.” The borrower used a Home Equity Conversion Mortgage (HECM) on the new home to provide 50 percent of its purchase price. The balance was paid in cash from the proceeds of the sale of her existing house plus other assets, so there were “no monthly repayments thereafter,” said Loxton.

-- Freelance writer Mark Fogarty contributed to this report.