Calculated Risk, one of the best real estate blogs out there, is reporting that despite worries about the market, mortgage applications bucked a recent trend and rose last week.
The Mortgage Bankers Association reportedthe numbers yesterday.
“The Market Composite Index, a measure of mortgage loan application volume, was 571.9, an increase of 7 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis from 534.4 one week earlier. On an unadjusted basis, the Index increased 17.9 percent compared with the previous week but was down 34.3 percent compared with the same week one year earlier,” reads an announcement on the association’s Web site.
In other words, while applications for home loans are up in the short term, they’re still down noticeably from last year.
Indeed, the guy at Calculated Risk goes one step further and pulls the year-on-year decreases in mortgage applications from Dow Jones :
Total: -34.3 percent
Purchase: -21.1 percent
Refinance: -49.5 percent
Fixed-rate: -34.1 percent
Adjustable-rate: -34.6 percent
Calculated Risk has a great graph for anyone who’s interested in that sort of thing.