It is not exactly a trend, but for the second-straight month, U.S. home prices saw year-over-year gains.

Including distressed sales (foreclosures and short sales), prices rose 1.1 percent in April, according to a new report from analytics firm CoreLogic.

Excluding distressed sales, prices rose 2.6 percent. Prices have not been up two months in a row since June 2010, when the home buyer tax credit was in force.

The national gains, however, belie a deeply disparate state-to-state housing market.

Home prices rose dramatically in markets where distressed homes make up the majority of sales, like Arizona, up 8.8 percent annually and Florida, up 5.5 percent. That’s because inventories of foreclosures have shrunk due to more slowdowns in bank processing.

Meanwhile other states with relatively smaller shares of distressed sales saw prices plunge: Delaware, down 10 percent, Alabama down 4.4 percent and Connecticut down over 2 percent, according to CoreLogic.

The spring sales season, while not exactly robust, was busy, especially for investors in distressed properties.

As for the summer, the numbers do not look as strong. After two months of gains, asking prices on for-sale homes, a two-month leading indicator, were unchanged in May month-to-month, according to a new report from sale site Trulia.com.

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For the first time in years, a guy who quantifies the foreclosure crisis got to report some good news.

Kyle Lundstedt’s colleagues at LPS Applied Analytics call him Dr. Doom, as he calculates all the numbers for the monthly Mortgage Monitor Report.

But this month he got to report a drop in mortgage delinquencies, down more than 11 percent month-over month, to the lowest level since 2008.

“We’re starting to see that there are a lot of folks who are still hanging in there,” says Lundstedt. “The population is a better credit quality population.”

The subprimes, Alt-A’s, the bad lending of the housing boom, have largely moved through the system already, not to mention that big banks and servicers are getting far more aggressive with loan modifications. One quarter of the loans that were more than 90 days delinquent last year are now current. That’s not to say they will all stay current, but that’s a good sign.

Unfortunately, that’s all Dr. Doom could muster on the bright side: “It’s progress; it’s not game-changing.”

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