Mortgage Applications for New Homes Up Eight Percent YoY

Mortgage applications for new home purchases last month were up eight percent year-over-year but where down two percent from September, according to the latest Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) Builder Application Survey (BAS) data.

The MBA estimated new single-family home sales were at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 547,000 units in October. The seasonally adjusted estimate for October is a decrease of 7.8 percent from the September pace of 593,000 units, while on an unadjusted basis the MBA estimated that there were 44,000 new home sales in October, unchanged from the previous months. Slightly more than two-third of applications involved conventional loan products.

“Year to date, the market share of builder applications has grown for conventional loans from 67.1 percent last year to 67.9 percent in 2016 and VA loans which increased from 12.5 percent last year to 13.1 percent in 2016,” said Lynn Fisher, MBA’s vice president of research and economics. The share of mortgage applications for new homes fell for FHA and RHS loans to 18.3 percent and 0.7 percent respectively.”