Dive summary:

• The housing analytical firm Trulia compiles a monthly "Housing Barometer" based on construction starts, existing home sales and delinquencies and foreclosures.
• When the company did its math for December, the national picture showed the country a little more than  halfway back to pre-recession levels, 52%.
• Trulia looks at where the data points are compared with the worst they got during the crash and with what used to be normal, resulting in a 52 for December, 49% in November and 27% in December 2011.

From the article:

The recovery, however, is uneven. ...