Mortgage applications continued to backslide last week, though not as quickly as before, the Mortgage Bankers Association [1] (MBA) reported.
The group's Market Composite Index [2], a measure of loan application volumes, fell 1.0 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis for the week ending June 20. The decline brings application levels back down to their lowest in two months. On an unadjusted basis, the index dropped 2 percent week-over-week.
Though hardly promising, the latest decline is an improvement over the 9.2 percent fall recorded a week prior [3] as the index was coming off a post-holiday gain.
Declines were even all around, with both the Refinance and the seasonally adjusted Purchase indices dipping 1.0 percent to their lowest in a month.
Meanwhile, the refinance share of total mortgage application activity was unchanged at just more than half: 52 percent.
The decreases came even as mortgage rates eased slightly. According to MBA's measure, the average contract rate for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage was 4.33 percent last week, a drop from 4.36 percent, with points decreasing to 0.18 from 0.24 for 80 percent loan-to-value ratio loans.