King County, Seattle, and Bellevue Real Estate Blog

It sounds like my marathon runner analogy is rounding into form... mortgage applications jumped almost 18% from last week, a sign that the real estate market might be stabilizing after last months drop after the expiration of the first time buyer tax credit.

Mortgage applications include applications for refinancing, and that made up almost 75 percent of all the applications. Interest rates are near all time lows on 30 year fixed mortgages, so not much of a surprise that homeowners are taking advantage of it.

The best news in the report is that remaining applications for new home purchases jumped 7% from last week, the first rise in 6 weeks (the end of the tax credit)! We all expected a bit of a dropoff after the tax credit expired, but market experts pointed to great interest rates and low priced homes as reason to think we would avoid a double dip in the real estate market.

We'll monitor where we go from here, but this is along the lines of what I expected and a great start towards sustaining the real estate recovery.

- Robert E. Wasser, Prospera's Seattle Real Estate Blog