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Forbes.com is reporting that nationally as well as regionally, homes sales increased as prices dropped.

The report showed sales of existing homes increased by 2.9%, to 5.03 million units in February, from 4.89 million in January. According to Thomson Financial, the Street had expected a decline of 0.8%, to 4.85 million units.

Although February’s numbers are still well below the all-time high of 7.072 million units set in 2005, the increase shows that the housing crisis may be waning.

The NAR has been reporting that they are looking for a recovery in the second half of the year.  Last summer I started saying second quarter.  Here are the regional numbers.

Existing-home sales saw the largest increase in the Northeast region with a gain of 11.3% to 890,000 in February. These homes were going for a median price of $264,800, up 0.4% from a year ago. The Midwest and the South also saw slight increases of 2.5% and 2.1% respectively; while home sales in the West slipped 1.1%, to 920,000.

Single-family home sales saw a boost of about 2.8%, to 4.47 million, with a median selling price of $193,900.

So, that is good news.

I won’t have numbers for Gwinnett County, GA until late in the first week of April, but we will see what we are looking like locally at that time.  The preliminary numbers were ugly, but they always are… it seems that a lot of people aren’t very good about getting their sales reported until after the first of the month.

As I have been saying for a little while, the best deals will start going away before anyone reports numbers showing the market turning.  We can only see where the market is headed after it is heading there… looking through the rear-view mirror, as it were.