Fewer Americans are falling behind on their mortgage payments; in fact, the fewest in two years. Mortgages just one payment past due (30 days) fell to their lowest level since just before the recession began. Is it delays in paperwork from the so called “robo-signing” (faulty paperwork) foreclosure servicing scandal? No. It’s actual fundamentals in the economy and the mortgage market. Go figure.

“As we got toward the end of 2010 we began to see another drop in weekly claims for unemployment insurance. I think that’s a key driver of the short term delinquencies,” notes Jay Brinkmann, chief economist at the Mortgage Bankers Association.

But even more significant is the improved underwriting that began after the mortgage market crashed. “The loans that are in the system now on average are better quality than what was in there before,” says Brinkmann, who explains that loans usually go bad in the first three years of life. We’re now past the delinquency peak on loans that were underwritten during the worst, headiest phase of the housing boom in 2006 and 2007. “These new loans are less likely to go bad,” Brinkmann adds.

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Most consider President’s Day weekend as the official start of the spring housing season.

There is, therefore, no more crucial time than now to have reliable data at our disposal for home sales, prices and inventories.

How else do buyers, sellers and investors know how to proceed? Unfortunately, the housing crash itself has undermined the veracity of those readings.

With the boom and the bust came the attention. Housing brought our economy down, and in doing so, boosted itself to the headlines. As with any big story, a cottage industry sprang up around it. Data providers came out of the woodwork, and as online sale and foreclosure web sites proliferated, so too did their ability to add to that data pool. The result is double edged: On the downside, some data providers are less-than accurate, but on the upside, their sheer numbers provide a system of checks and balances, tempering the most outrageous assertions.

So it seems sort of appropriate that today, as a new controversy swarms around potential errors in home sales figures from the National Association of Realtors, the exalted and much-contested SP/Case-Shiller Home Price Index is released.

It reports that home prices are dangerously close to an official double dip. Other data providers have been asserting recently that SP/Case-Shiller is too bullish (and of course too bearish).

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