As we all know by now, the troubled housing market has resulted in a sharp decline in home values over the past year, and the big question on everybody's mind has been, at what point will prices be cheap enough to attract attention? Perhaps this is the start of the bottom forming in home sales that the market has been so anxiously awaiting.

Pending home sales data is figured by looking at properties that are under contract, but have not yet had a deal finalized. The parts of the country that saw the biggest jump in pending home sales were the South and MidWest, which each saw a rise of about 13%, but other parts of the country such as West and Northeast were not so fortunate: those regions saw drops of 4% and 2% respectively.

So while we do have reason to be excited about today's news, it is still way too early to start to expect the worst to be behind us. There is still a long road ahead before we can say the housing market is back on its feet and moving in the right direction.

In related housing news, residential construction company D.R. Horton (NYSE: DHI), the nations largest homebuilder posted better than expected earnings for its fiscal first quarter. The company posted a loss of $0.20 per share, but this was less than the $0.52 that analysts had been expecting, and better than the $0.41 per share loss that it reported for the same period last year.

Shares of DHI have moved sharply higher today, trading up 22.9% to $7.51, up $1.40.