With growth shifting from South Florida to Central and North Florida, a prominent multifamily-housing investment-advisory brokerage from Boca Raton is opening a local office to devote more resources to the Orlando area.

Apartment Realty Advisors is opening the full-service office at 400 Park Ave. South in Winter Park, reflecting the South Florida company’s growing Orlando-area client base and a shift in statewide demographics that favors Central Florida, said Ken Krasnow, the company’s chief operating officer.

Mortgage applications in the U.S. rose 2.4 percent last week, led by gains in refinancing.

The Mortgage Bankers Association’s index of applications to buy a home or refinance a loan rose to 673.2 from 657.4 the prior week. The group’s purchase index rose 0.9 percent and its refinancing gauge increased 4.6 percent.

Rising applications haven’t altered most economists’ view that the two-year housing slump will linger as foreclosures rise and tougher lending standards make borrowing more difficult. The credit meltdown “has the potential to intensify the housing correction, and to restrain economic growth more generally,” the Federal Reserve said yesterday after cutting interest rates.

A surge in foreclosure filings in August might signal a new wave of people losing their homes as more mortgages reset to unaffordable rates, according to a report released Tuesday.

In the Bay Area, the number of houses scheduled to be sold on the courthouse steps quadrupled compared with a year ago, according to RealtyTrac, an Irvine company that sells foreclosure listings. In the nine-county region, 1,280 households were notified they were going on the block compared with 301 last August. By far the highest incidence of auction notices was in Contra Costa County, with 699 notices.

Boxed in by antsy investors and worrisome economic indicators, the Federal Reserve had little choice but to lower interest rates Tuesday, for the first time in more than four years. It did so with unexpected vigor. Not only did it lop half a percentage point off its target for the federal funds rate (the interest that banks charge each other for overnight loans), but it cut the same amount from the discount rate (the interest the Fed charges on short-term loans to banks).

Housing starts and building permits in August dropped to the lowest rate since June 1995, the U.S. Census Bureau and Department of Housing and Urban Development announced today.

The seasonally adjusted annual rate of building permits dropped to an estimated 1.31 million in August, down 24.5 percent compared to August 2006, and the rate of housing starts fell 19.1 percent to 1.33 million. This rate is a projection of a monthly total over a 12-month period, adjusted for seasonal fluctuations in construction activity.