The following is part of our series wading through the economic jargon, Crunching Numbers.

Michael Izquierdo (left) and Henry Cassini(right) had dinner in downtown. (Photo by Shako Liu)

So he has mixed feelings about more evidence pointing to a turnaround in the real estate market.

The entry of more buyers into the market is driving demand for Cassini’s remaining properties. But that demand is also shrinking banks’ inventories of troubled housing, leaving less for opportunists like Cassini.

Foreclosure properties scheduled for sale dropped 3.7 percent in L.A. from July to August and 15 percent from a year earlier, according to a report from Foreclosure Radar.

Cassini said he knows the clock is ticking on his business.

“It’s not going to last forever so you have to make enough to go into something else, maybe commercial [properties].”

In another sign of an improving housing market, an index that measures pending home sales nationwide rose 2.4 percent from June to July and was up 12.4 percent from last year, hitting the highest level in more than two years, according to the National Association of Realtors.

A pending home sale is one for which a contract is signed but the transaction hasn’t yet closed. It is a leading indicator of housing demand.

Michael Izquierdo, owner of Wealth Realty in L.A., said he sees many young buyers coming into the market. Another change is that he is getting more phone calls from loan officers looking to make mortgages.

“I got two phone calls today from mortgage companies I’ve never heard of,” Izquierdo said.

On the sellers’ side, the market’s reversal is causing some people to hold back from listing properties, hoping for significantly higher prices.

Homeowners who are underwater - meaning their home is worth less than their mortgage balance - may want to sell but would take a loss if they did. In downtown L.A., that problem has left the market with too few properties for sale as demand picks up, said real estate agent Theodore Trentman.

He said it’s understandable that owners in that position would be reluctant to think about negotiating so-called short sales, by which lenders agree to take a loss to allow a homeowner to sell. The owner exits with no gain but avoids foreclosure.

But Trentman said that depending on how far underwater a property is, it may be unrealistic for the owner to bet on prices rising enough to give them a profit anytime soon. In the meantime, with buyers hungry for downtown homes, sellers may be missing a chance to move on if their lenders would be willing to consider a short sale, he said.

“They may not be able to recover from the situation they are in,” Trentman said. “So they’d better start looking at options."

Read more from Neon Tommy's Crunching Numbers series here.

Reach Staff Reporter Shako Liu here. Follow her on Twitter here.