With the unemployment rate now at 5.5%, it’s no surprise that we’re feeling more optimistic about our future. And while mortgage financing is still tough to get since banks are still hesitant to take on too much risk, that optimism is translating to home sales.

New home sales climbed to a seven-year high in February, rising 7.8% to an annualized rate of 539,000 properties. Prices are also on the upswing, with the median sales price of a new home rising 2.6% year-over-year to $275,500. While that’s still well below the “normal” rate of about 800,000 sales, it’s pretty impressive considering the massive real estate crash we suffered less than a decade ago.

Sales of existing homes aren’t quite at pre-crisis levels either, but they continue to show improvement as well. Last month’s sales rose 1.2% to an annualized rate of 4.88 million, just shy of the historical average of 5 million units.

So while we’ve still got a long way to go – there are some metropolitan areas where there are still a disturbing number of home owners underwater on their mortgages – the U.S. real estate market has made huge strides towards recovery.

We here at Investing Daily have been covering the real estate revival for a few years now, profiting from the slow but steady upticks in demand for everything from houses to commercial properties.

Personal Finance has been following Home Depot (NYSE: HD) for a few years now.

The world’s largest home improvement retailer, the chain’s annual revenue topped $83 billion in its last fiscal year as it has continued expanding its footprint in the U.S., Canada and Mexico. Estimated to hold a 20% market share here in the U.S., the orange big box store caters to both professional contractors and the weekend do-it-yourselfer.

Amazingly, Home Depot only suffered negative revenue growth between 2008 – 2010, while earnings per share (EPS) growth was only negative in 2008 and 2009. Clearly, management was able to adeptly maneuver through those challenging years and continues to do so. While 10-year average revenue growth has fallen fairly precipitously from 12.4% in 2008 to just 1.3% (largely the effect of the bad years), average EPS growth over the trailing decade is 7.6%. On a year-over-year basis, it has been running at better than 20% over the past five years thanks to newfound supply chain efficiencies.

Another example of savvy management is that fact that while the company’s dividend stood pat at $0.90 for three years in the late 2000s, it has risen each year since 2010 to $1.88 today with an average payout ratio of about 40%. The c-suite clearly has a grasp of cash flow management.

Having become leaner and meaner, Home Depot only stands to gain from a recovering real estate market, especially the marked improvement in existing home sales.

Over at Roadrunner Stocks, there’s Marcus & Millichap (NYSE: MMI). While the company only went pubic a little over a year ago, it’s been dealing in commercial real estate investment sales since 1971 and is a market leader in the investment real estate brokerage market. It completes more than 6,000 transactions in the average year at a total value of about $24 billion. In addition to its transactional business, it also provides deal financing services and produces hundreds of market reports each year.

It serves a variety of clients, but its business by and large consists of working with private clients (i.e. high net worth individuals) on deals valued between $1 million – $10 million. While that segment accounts for more than three-quarters of its transactions, it also works with investment partnerships and institutional clients, which typically consists of deals valued at $10 million and up.

Given its particular market niche, Marcus & Millichap faces relatively little competition. Based on their firms own reckoning, it benefits from the fact that most of its private clients are in the market for a variety of personal factors ranging from death, divorce or partnership changes. That results in a relatively stable business flow since it’s impossible to plan for most of those sorts of contingencies, and most commercial real estate firms are focused more on corporate clients.

Over the past four years, revenue at the company has jumped from $218 million to $572 million in 2014. EPS data is only available for the past two years given the timing of its IPO, but earnings have jumped from $0.24 in 2013 to $1.27 last year, driven by both growing deal volume and improved cost efficiencies.

With the real estate market likely to only continue improving from here, Marcus & Millichap’s business will continue growing.