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Mortgage applications, including both purchase and refinance volumes, fell a seasonally adjusted 9.0 percent week-over-week for the week ending February 6, the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) said Wednesday.

According to the company's most recent data, the average down payment on conventional, 30-year fixed-rate loan offers made to LendingTree borrowers last quarter was 17.59 percent, up from 16.01 percent in the final months of 2013.

Quicken Loans said Tuesday that appraisers' home value estimates came in an average 0.18 percent higher than homeowners' estimates last month. The difference marks the narrowest gap between opinions since September 2013, when appraisers' estimates came in higher than homeowners' for the first time in seven years.

Based on Zillow's latest homeownership data, the company estimated in a report on Monday that 12.4 percent of applicants who applied for a conventional mortgage loan in 2013 were denied. While the denial rate for white applicants was slightly better than the national average at 10.4 percent and only a little worse for Asians at 13.3 percent, black and Hispanic applicants stood a much higher chance of being turned down.

Sixty-seven percent of American adults responding to Fannie Mae's January National Housing Survey said now is a good time to buy a home, the company reported Monday, while 44 percent said now is a good time to sell. Both figures are up from December, when positive responses were at 64 percent and 40 percent, respectively.

Trulia's latest look at the U.S. housing market shows homebuyer interest in January and February is up 2 percent from the annual average since 2011, a trend that has paved the way for robust March-to-July buying interest.

The index ticked slightly upward in Q4 to 0.90, one point higher than Q3's revised figure of 0.89. The number of markets at or above their normal levels in Q4 increased from 60 in the previous quarter and from 52 in the same quarter a year earlier.

In a meeting with reporters on Wednesday, Mel Watt, former U.S. representative and chief of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) since December 2013, discussed a number of key issues facing the GSEs and the agency, touching on topics ranging from recently introduced low down payment programs to the often debated subject of principal reduction for struggling homeowners.

Based on an analysis of loan applications passing through its own fraud detection technology, Interthinx said Tuesday that its national Mortgage Fraud Risk Index measured 98 in Q3 2014, down 2 percent from the quarter prior and 9 percent from the year-ago period.

In its most recent Home Price Index (HPI) release, CoreLogic reported that prices advanced 5.0 percent nationwide in December compared to the same month in 2013. The estimate includes REO transactions and short sales.