Monthly home sales reports in the Tampa Bay area have been numbingly repetitive since about February.

Year to year sales? Up about 20 percent. Year to year home prices? Down about 20 percent. Inventory of home listings? Getting thinner as the months pass.

So I'd rate this as a pleasant numbing experience, more akin to ice cream on the tongue than to Novocain in the gums.

Here's the latest leak from the Pinellas Realtor Organization. July home sales rose 26 percent from a year earlier, from 841 to 1,134. Prices dipped 21 percent over that year, from $172,500 to $136,200.

The supply of homes on the market is still high but constricting: 12,479 in July 2009 versus 15,919 in July 2008.

It's worth repeating that a huge number of transactions involve house hunters plucking off foreclosure-wounded gazelles. In July, about 44 percent of sales were all-cash deals.

I'm sure plenty of these people are investors who intend to rent the properties. But I suppose a sale's a sale. A smaller supply, by stopping the destabilizing home price slide, will benefit the market