Mortgage Loan Applications Flat for September
The data is in for new home sales in September, and it’s looking a little flat. Based on the number of mortgage loan applications filed for the purposes of buying a new home, it would seem that buying activity was essentially unchanged from August. This information is coming to us from the Mortgage Bankers Association’s Builder Application Survey, released on the ninth.
The data shows that new single-family homes were selling at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of about 425,000 last month, representing an 0.2 percent increase over the estimate of 424,000 made in August. Conversely, the unadjusted data shows us a total of about 32,000 homes sold in September, representing a 5.9 percent shortfall of the 34,000 new homes that were sold in August. The MBA’s chief economist said of this, “Earlier this summer, and again last month, the first estimates from Census were significantly higher than the estimates implied from the applications data. However, the revised data from Census resulted in a much closer match to MBA’s estimates, and we anticipate that will be the case going forward, given the high rate of coverage in our survey.”
Of the mortgage loan applications submitted in September, 67.6 percent were conventional loans, 16.7 percent were FHA loans, 14.5 percent were VA loans, and 1.2 percent were USDA Rural Housing Service loans. The size of the average loan dropped from August’s $300,443 to $298,274.
