Applications for mortgages for new home purchases increased 3% in April compared with March and were up 15.6% compared with April 2018, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association’s (MBA) Builder Application Survey (BAS).
“There was a healthy increase in new home purchase activity in April, boosted by the strong economic and employment conditions seen in the first quarter of 2019,” says Joel Kan, associate vice president of economic and industry forecasting for the MBA, in a statement. “Applications for new home purchases increased, as did our estimate for new home sales.
“After two months of declines, MBA estimates that April new home sales were 10 percent higher than last April and reached the highest annual pace since this survey’s inception in 2013,” Kan adds.
New single-family home sales were running at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 722,000 units in April 2019, based on data from the BAS.
Also helping to boost applications was that more inventory was brought online. As of the end of April there were about 676,000 new homes available for sale, an increase of 6.8% compared with March.
On an unadjusted basis, the MBA estimates that there were 69,000 new home sales in April, an increase of 4.5% compared with 66,000 in March.
Conventional loans composed 70.7% of applications for new home sales, while FHA loans composed 17.1%, RHS/USDA composed 0.6% and VA composed 11.5%.
The average loan size for a new home in April was $338,745, up from $331,794 in March.