The median price of home sales in 20 of the nation’s major cities fell by an average of 0.6 percent in April, according to Standard & Poor’s Case-Shiller index, showing great improvement over March when they slid by 2.2 percent. Yet plenty of people are not so sure this is a sign of economic recovery on the whole.

As Steve Blitz writes on his economic markets blog:

“Recession definitely impacts home prices… But in each cycle, home prices recover before the economy does… Because the perception of recovery lags reality, this means that home prices begin to recover long before consumers believe the recession has ended and certainly before the unemployment rate starts to turn down… My forecast is for home prices to begin [to] move higher in the third quarter and to finish 2009 with prices about 11% below year-end 2008 levels.”

And home prices did start to rise in several of the tracked metro areas. Dallas, Denver, and Cleveland all experienced price gains of 1 percent or more from March.

But even S&P chairman David Blitzer is cautious about announcing this as a good sign.

“While one month’s data cannot determine if a turnaround has begun; it seems that some stabilization may be appearing in some of the regions. We are entering the seasonally strong period in the housing market, so it will take some time to determine if a recovery is really here,” he said.

Blitzer attributed the slowing of price declines to a rise in consumer confidence and rallies in the stock market.  So what’s it all mean? Now may be the best time to get off the fence and buy a home before prices continue to rise. Then again, these number can easily fluctuate based on unemployment and other factors, so maybe you can wait until you actually start seeing price gains in a majority of the metro areas.