What do you make of a market where pending home sales drop, as they did in the latest monthly survey, but many other real estate and mortgage indicators are trending positive at the same time?

For starters, you can recognize it for what it is -- a fitful, bumpy recovery we've got underway.

On pending homes sales, no question there's softness in the wake of the tax credit phaseout.

But a national drop of just 2.6 percent in the National Association of Realtors' index wasn't all that dramatic.

In fact, buried away in the pending sales statistics were some counter-trends that got virtually no press attention whatsoever.

For example, several major markets are seeing significant increases in pending sales.

Check out South Florida, which was ground zero for the housing bust. Pending sales of houses and condos in the greater Miami-South Dade area rose by nearly 41 percent year-over-year in the latest survey.

Yes, distressed transactions, short sales and foreclosures account for a lot of that activity. But it's absolutely essential to sop up all that unsold, troubled inventory in South Florida -- and that's what's clearly beginning to happen.

Pendng sales also were up in the metropolitan Washington DC area along with much of Texas. The entire southern region of the U.S. racked up a 3.7 percent increase in pending sales -- a fact that somehow got lost in all the negative coverage.

Another sign that even in the midst of tough economic times, people are looking to buy homes: The Mortgage Bankers Association reports that applications for new loans to purchase houses rose for the third straight week, this time by 2 percent. FHA home purchase applications were up by 3 percent.

These are modest gains, but they're also signals that housing just might be turning the corner after the lows following the expiration of the credits earlier in the spring.

By the way, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke made some interesting comments last week that shed light on what's developing in the marketplace overall:

Number one, he said, private employment is slowly, but surely, improving. During the first six months of 2010, private payrolls expanded by an average 100,000 jobs per month.

Bernanke also said consumer spending, which has been cautious since the recession ended, is looking up. As he put it, "growth in real consumer spending seems likely to pick up during (upcoming) quarters, supported by gains in (household) income and improving credit conditions."

And that could prove very important to the housing outlook for the months ahead.

Published: August 9, 2010

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Kenneth R. Harney writes an award-winning, nationally-syndicated column on housing and real estate from Washington, D.C. He is also managing director of the National Real Estate Development Center, a professional education company. He is a past member of the Federal Reserve Board's Consumer Advisory Council, a committee that by federal statute reviews all Fed actions on home mortgage, consumer credit and banking industry regulation. He served as a member of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's Working Group on Computerized Loan Origination (CLO) systems, and is a member of the Editorial Board of the Fannie Mae Foundation's journal, Housing Policy Debate. He is the author of two books on mortgage finance and real estate.