This can be a glass half-full or half-empty story, but it depends how you look at it. The Boston Business Journal has an item on a study by Core Logic that reports that 16 percent of Boston homeowners have mortgage values that exceed their house value — another 3.5% or so are close to even.

That may sound like bad news, but it is better than the national average of negative or near-negative values for a whopping 27.9  percent of homeowners.

File under: Glass half-full, hold the ice.

The Boston Business Journal reports on the most recent data compiled by CoreLogic on the local residential real estate market. Year over year for December 2010, CoreLogic reports that in the Boston-Quincy metro area, values were up 6.16 percent. For the 2010 up to Nov. 30, values over all in this area were up 4.65 percent. The BBJ also notes most of these gains were in “healthy sales” — not distressed property or short sale scenarios. This fits with a lot of anecdotal evidence that there is a lot of stubborn resiliency to sale prices in our market. One explanation could be that for “healthy sales” we’re still talking about the higher end of the market, where there’s been more activity than in the mid and lower priced sales.

Do you agree with me?  Let’s get a conversation going…

Comparing 3rd Q total Boston condo market sales volume:

Boston condo sales volume in 2010: $495,027,145

Boston condo sales volume in 2009: $567,371,219

Boston condo sales volume in 2008: $583,540,140

Boston condo sales volume in 2007: $600,150,008

Despite the end of the federal tax credit, housing conditions across most of the country improved in May, according to a new S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices report.

Massachusetts fared pretty well, with home prices increasing about 1.6 percent month-to-month and 4.8 percent year-over-year. The report tends to confirm what Banker & Tradesman is also reporting (see posts below).

The big shocker in the S&P/C-S study: San Francisco’s prices have soared 18.3 percent over the past year.

Single-family home sales in Massachusetts spiked 45.8 percent in April compared to the same month a year ago, while condominiums sales soared 55.7 percent, according to The Warren Group, publisher of Banker & Tadesman. The article also noted that median home prices climbed for the fifth straight month.