![]()
- White House Plans to Freeze Spending to Cut Deficit
- Week Ahead: Investors Go for Quality, Assess Recovery
- Hedge Fund Billionaire Paulson Reports New Citi Stake
- Cramer: 5 Earnings Reports to Watch Next Week
- Court Rejects 'Clawbacks' for Alleged Stanford Victims
- Cities With the Most Home Price Reductions
- Tax Credit Sparking First-Time Home Sales: Realtors
- Investors Cut Back US Stocks for Bigger Growth Abroad
- This Year's Biggest Thanksgiving Leftover: Cash
- U.S. Stocks Rally for the Second Straight Week
- Dollar is Not Plunging—So 'Calm Down': Market Strategist
- Strategists Say Markets Have More Upside — But How Much?
- Hirschhorn: Risk-Averse Traders
- Roginsky: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Financial Reform
- This Year's Biggest Thanksgiving Leftover: Cash
- TV Series Inks Unique Deal For Fight
- First Time Buyers Rescue Housing: Realtors
- Dollar General Trades Higher After Its IPO
MOST SHARED
- CNBC Video: Warren Buffett & Bill Gates - Keeping American Great
- Today's Market Action
- Has Twitter's Finest Hours (Seconds) Come and Gone?
- Microsoft's Bill Gates Praises Apple's Steve Jobs For 'Saving the Company'
- CNBC TRANSCRIPT: Warren Buffett & Bill Gates - Keeping America Great
- China's Role as Lender Alters Dynamics for United States
- Israel Going Green
- Inside Wal-Mart's Acai Berry Juice Maker
- Low Interest Rate Investing
U.S. mortgage applications tumbled for the third straight week to the lowest level since July 2006 even as borrowing costs declined, an industry trade group said on Thursday.
Applications for loans to buy homes fell to the lowest level in more than four years, while demand for refinancing loans dropped to the lowest since December 2006, the Mortgage Bankers Association said.
The trade group's seasonally adjusted index of total mortgage application activity fell 11.6 percent in the week ending Dec. 28 to 533.9. Its purchase index dropped 8.5 percent to 360.8 and the refinancing index slid 15.4 percent to 1,620.9.
Purchase demand has not been as low since the week of Oct. 10, 2003, when the gauge hit 359.0, the MBA said.
Applications were stunted during the Christmas holiday week despite falling mortgage rates.
"There's probably an exaggerated holiday effect in the most recent week's release" even with the seasonal and holiday adjustments, Doug Duncan, chief economist at the MBA, told Reuters.
Continued Weakness
He said the data are consistent with the trend for continued weakness in the real estate market and the MBA's forecast for housing to bottom in third quarter of 2008.
Refinancing demand has held up fairly well because it is interest-rate sensitive, Duncan said. But home buying typically slows during the winter months and consumers are also nervous about the state of the economy.
"From Thanksgiving to the end of January is really the dead spot in the industry," he said. "If you get weather effects, or as you have today, lots of concerns about whether the economy is going to get worse ... there's no surprise that you're seeing, especially on the purchase side, downturns because consumers are just unsure."
Smoothing out for volatility, the MBA's four-week averages for all three indexes also fell.
The market index dropped 9 percent, the purchase index declined 5.9 percent and the refinancing index sank 11.8 percent on a four-week moving basis, though the levels were little changed from October.
Adjustable-rate mortgages kept fading as a share of total applications. ARMs represented less than 10 percent of all loans, the trade group said, having at their peak in 2006 accounted for more 30 percent of loans requests.
Rates have begun to reset to sharply higher levels for many of those borrowers who took out loans at low initial rates are.
One-year adjustable mortgages dipped 3 basis points in the week to 6.00 percent, the lowest since mid-November. Fixed 30-year mortgage rates averaged 6.05 percent, down 5 basis points, the lowest since late November, the association said.
- Warren Buffett and Bill Gates spoke to Columbia students, and Buffett made the students a startling offer.
- For the chief of cable company Comcast, growth has been about making deals – generally very large deals.
- Some companies may start using insurance to shift carbon risk from their balance sheets to maybe... yours?
- The president and founder of Genesis Today wants to improve America’s health, and thinks Wal-Mart can help.
- Switzerland's privacy watchdog is taking legal action to force Google to make changes to its Street View service.
- A wealthy, distracted Texas driver crashed his million-dollar Bugatti Veyron sports car into a salt marsh, say police.












