Marketers generally rejoice at the news of rising housing prices. Besides indicating a bit of consumer optimism about the future, it usually means demand is up and that folks will be buying new appliances, services and tchotchkes to fill upgraded abodes. And so, there’s a reason for some cheer this morning as USA Today is among the media prominently reporting that “record low mortgage rates and some of the cheapest housing prices in decades spurred some long-desired home sales,” according to the S&P/Case-Shiller composite index of U.S. home prices, which rose 1.3% for the month of April. "All the headlines are positive on house prices, and this is important because they've been going down for five years," UBS Investment Research economist Maury Harris tells Tim Mullaney. "It's a confidence builder at a time when Americans really need something good happening." Bill Briggs’ report on MSNBC.com is a bit less effusive. “Prices twitched a tinge higher as values in the ‘sand states’ further firmed while listings in some key northern cities continued to chill,” he writes, also suggesting that banks are holding some foreclosed properties off the market in an attempt to pump the value of more desirable stock. “We can see on the street what’s vacant and what’s not. We’re watching these (foreclosed and non-listed) houses just sit and rot,” Michelle Tremblay, a Realtor with West USA Realty in Phoenix, tells Briggs. “The banks are letting these houses just deteriorate.” Still, “economists were optimistic that the uptick in prices was significant and that real estate may be contributing again toward building American wealth,” writes Alejandro Lazoin the Los Angeles Times. PBS News Hour correspondent Paul Solman certainly takes a lot of positive out of the news in “The Business Desk” (which is “not a blog but a "q-and-a" [pronounced "quanda"] … whose premise is “there are no stupid q's), even while cautioning that we should not read too much into a single month's data. Of the top 20 metro areas, only Detroit failed to gain, he says, “not that you'd necessarily know the good news from today's headlines,” which tended to be less positive than he is. Solman also points to a Wall Street Journalreport that home prices in Ireland have risen for the first time since the collapse of the market there five years ago despite all of the current uncertainty over the euro. “A cosmic conjunction, perhaps,” Solman writes. “Now if only the same thing could happen in Spain.” Don’t start getting too giddy about all this news, Binyamin Appelbaum points out in his “Economix” blog in the New York Times. Despite carrying the optimistic hed “We All Start Small,” Appelbaum douses the blanket with three cold buckets of caution: