It's clear that the free fall in U.S. home sales—which went into a sharp contraction after the Federal Reserve's inflation fight saw mortgage rates spike from 3% to over 7% in 2022—is behind us.
On Wednesday, we learned that the seasonally adjusted Mortgage Purchase Application Index ticked up 3.1% last week to 190. On one hand, the index remains far below the 282 reading it had during the same week in 2022. On the other hand, the index has clearly stabilized in recent weeks after bottoming at a 159 reading during the first week of January.
