Don’t look now, but a key measure of purchase activity in the still-beset US housing market just managed a 33-month-high in holiday-adjusted data released Wednesday.

I wouldn’t get too excited. Economist Joel Kan, who’s generally responsible for the editorials which accompany the MBA’s weekly updates, certainly isn’t. Too excited, I mean.

“We continue to see mixed results each week as the broader economic outlook remains cloudy, even as cooling home-price growth and increasing for-sale inventory bring some buyers back into the market,” he said, describing the uptick in the association’s widely-followed gauge of purchase apps as “slight.”

“Slight” or not, the 2.5% WoW increase pushed the index to its highest since February of 2023, as shown above. Refis retreated a fifth week.

I don’t want to make too big a deal of this, but it does bear mentioning. Over the past several weeks, we’ve seen some green shoots in the frozen tundra that is US housing, even as a majority of the data suggests a real thaw is months away, at the soonest.

This week’s MBA figures included an adjustment for the Thanksgiving holiday, and I’d be remiss not to point out — dreary as it sounds — that the decline on the 30-year fixed index, the first in over a month, came courtesy of macro data suggesting the US economy’s deteriorating.

As Kan put it, “mortgage rates moved lower in line with Treasury yields, which declined on data showing a weaker labor market and declining consumer confidence.” Wednesday’s jobs data from ADP was quite weak.

On the bright side for anyone struggling to make the math work on a home, the median rent in America’s now the lowest since February of 2022.