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The Mortgage Bankers Association said Thursday that purchase applications for newly built homes rose 29 percent from December to January, not including any seasonal adjustments. In a statement, the MBA's vice president of research and economics, Lynn Fisher, said the increase reflected an improving labor market and lower interest rates.
Going by mortgage application figures and assumptions about the market, the group estimates that new single-family home sales last month were at a seasonally adjusted annualized rate of 530,000, a nearly 30 percent increase over its December estimate of 409,000. In an estimate in late January, the Commerce Department put new home sales at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 481,000 in December. Revised data, which will be released later this month, will show how close the MBA's projections were.
The national median price for existing single-family homes in the fourth quarter of 2014 was about 209,000 dollars, up 6 percent from the same quarter in 2013, according to a report released Wednesday by the National Association of Realtors. That was better than the third quarter, which saw 4.8 percent annual growth. While the continued rise in prices is good news for homeowners, NAR chief economist Lawrence Yun says that without stronger income growth and an increase in available homes for sale, homebuyers will continue to struggle.
