Mortgage demand resilient in the first half of 2026

Demand for mortgage purchase applications has shown some resilience in the first half of this year, even as rates ticked up amid a lot of dramatic headlines. At one point, mortgage rates rose 0.76% from their yearly lows to their highs. How has this impacted mortgage demand? As crazy as this sounds, if I take the snow impact out of the data pool, 2026 has been an awfully calm year.

For my 2026 forecast, I said that we could get 237,000 more existing home sales if mortgage rates would just stay at 6.25% and under, which was happening early in the year. But mortgage rates spiked higher as the Iran conflict continues on and on with no definitive end. 

Lets take a look at the demand data, since in the previous decade we would see purchase application volumes traditionally fall after May as seasonality kicks in.

Purchase application data

For the most part, purchase applications have been positive year over year almost every week. We had year-over-year growth in 2025, but that was more due to the low base effect, as purchase application data was working from levels last seen in the mid-1990s when No Doubt was the top new band. So last year’s year-over-year growth should be taken with a grain of salt, while this year’s growth amid rising rates is more impressive, since existing home sales really bottomed out in 2022 and have remained historically low for years.

In the last decade, I would weigh the MBA purchase application data from the second week of January to the first week of May, as these were the seasonal peak months for this index. Typically, volumes fall after May each year.  Things have changed a bit post-COVID as we have seen more growth toward the end of the year in this index, which was uncommon in the previous decade. Now, I am keeping an eye out to see if this index returns to normal seasonal patterns.

In the past few years, we have only seen existing home-sales growth with 12-14 weeks of positive week-to-week data, more than year-over-year growth. In fact, in late 2022 and mid-2024, when we saw sales growth, we didn’t have much positive year-over-year data, but at least 12-14 weeks of positive week-to-week growth.

In 2026, the week-to-week data has been choppy, but the year-over-year growth has performed better than I would have thought since we don’t have an epic low bar anymore.  

Here’s 2026 so far:

• 9 positive week-to-week prints
• 10 negative week-to-week prints
• 2 flat week-to-week prints
• 9 weeks of double-digit year-over-year growth
• 19 weeks of positive year-over-year growth
• 2 negative year-over-year prints

Conclusion

I always like to tie the purchase application data with our weekly pending home sales data. This way, we have multiple demand data sets working together because purchase application data is a funky trend survey. You can find our latest Housing Market Tracker here.

What the purchase application data and our weekly pending home sales data show is that housing demand bottomed out years ago, and as affordability slowly improves — with wage growth outpacing home-price growth — it’s building a better base over time. Also, mortgage rates staying below 7% so far in 2026 has helped. Again, hug a mortgage spread. 

If mortgage rates had gone above 7% with some duration, the housing data would not looked like it has so far this year. Going forward, affordability has slowly improved and inventory is up significantly from the lows in 2022. Price growth is cooling down.

All this provides a much healthier housing market going out for years to come and is much better than the savagely unhealthy housing market of 2020-2023.