I love positive thinking, especially the variety that goes something like this: "Yes, you lost your foot in that freak bicycle accident but on the positive side you still have your leg!"  Thus you'll understand why I really like this story from the Winston-Salem Journal titled Existing-Home Sales Up for Fourth Month and this excerpt in particular:

The Winston-Salem Regional Association of Realtors said yesterday that 324 homes were sold last month, up 3.8 percent from the 312 sold in March.

"While it is not uncommon for sales to increase month over month for the first half of the year, it is encouraging in this climate that we are returning to more normal home-buying patterns in our community," said Phillip Rector with Mundy Realty and the president of the association.

Still, April home sales were down 34.8 percent from April 2008, when 497 homes were sold. The average sales price was $157,000 last month, down 11.3 percent from $177,000 for the same period a year ago

I think a better gauge of how good this news is (or isn't) would be to compare the growth from March-April in 2008 with March-April of this year. While this story tells us that home sales were up 3.8% from March to April of 2009 we don't know what the increase from March to April of 2008 was, which means we don't know if we have better or worse growth than last year.  If housing sales actually declined this time last year then it makes the fact that April sales this year were down 35% from last year not so bad, because last year sales were sliding from month-to-month and this year they're on the rise.  But if March-April sales last year were actually an increase of 7% then that means that not only are the year-to-year comparisons bad, but the seasonal growth in sales this year is also worse than last year, which makes the news really bad.

Long story short: I really hope the news is good, but the data given in this story doesn't really tell us if it is or not.