There are a number of reasons that home sales should be seeing a prolonged downturn, such as extremely strict lending standards (although very low interest rates), a spike in contract failures and unemployment rates that continue to be higher than ideal. However, despite all that, the National Association of Realtors (NAR) reports that home sales actually saw an uptick again in October.

In fact the recently released data from October showed dually positive trends.

First, the increase in sales, with total completed sales of single family, townhomes, condos and co-ops crawling up 1.4% from September, to a seasonally-adjusted annual rate of 4.97 million through October. While a slight increase over September, it’s also a 13.5% jump compared to October of 2010. According to NAR, the market has remained relatively steady, simply at a lower total level than is ideal.

Contract failures—cancellations caused by declined mortgage applications, home inspection issues, loan underwriting/appraisal value problems, job loss and the like—were at a staggeringly high 33% in October, which certainly shoulders part of the blame for the lower sales.

The second reason for optimism given October’s data was the continually declining total home inventory. By the end of October, the number of existing homes for sale nationally had fallen another 2.2% to 3.33 million. That means that at the current sales rate, it would take 8 months to sell all homes on the market, down from 8.3 months in September.

All in all, the housing market still has a lot of recovering to do, however stringing together a few consecutive months with this kind of positive trending will certainly help get the economy back on the right track.