Just a year since the U.S. housing market hit bottom after the biggest plunge in eight decades, signs of excess are re-emerging.

An open house for a five-bedroom brownstone in Brooklyn, New York, priced at $949,000 drew 300 visitors and brought in 50 offers. Three thousand miles away in Menlo Park, California, a one-story home listed for $2 million got six offers last month, including four from builders planning to tear it down to construct a bigger house. In south Florida, ground zero for the last building boom and bust, 3,300 new condominium units are under way, the most since 2007.

The U.S. spring homebuying season has been marked by a frenzy of demand fueled by the Federal Reserve’s drive to push down borrowing costs, a scarcity of listings and Wall Street’s new appetite for foreclosed homes. While values remain well below their peak, economists including Stan Humphries of Zillow Inc. and Mark Vitner of Wells Fargo & Co. assert prices in some areas are rising at an unsustainable pace -- a dramatic shift from early 2012, when billionaire Warren Buffett said housing “remains in a depression.”

“It’s a big change from a year ago,” said Paul Willen, a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. “You’ve gone from hearing horror stories about people losing money to hearing stories of frenzy -- lots of traffic and multiple offers.”

Price Surge

U.S. home prices jumped almost 11 percent in March from a year earlier, the biggest gain since the height of the real estate boom in 2006, CoreLogic Inc. reported last week. Values are rising faster than incomes, an indication that prices may fall in some cities once higher mortgage rates erode affordability, Humphries said. Investor purchases will inevitably cool, adding another potential hit to the market, according to Vitner.

The gains in some U.S. areas aren’t sustainable for a healthy market, said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington.

“If prices keep going up at this rate for another six months, we will have a bubble, and people will get hurt,” he said in a telephone interview.

U.S. buyers spent three times their annual incomes on homes at the end of last year, and those properties were 15 percent pricier relative to incomes than before the housing bubble of the mid-2000s, according to data from Seattle-based Zillow. Markets such as Silicon Valley, Southern California, Boston and New York will look expensive relative to incomes when mortgage rates rise, Humphries said.

‘On Sale’

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