The mortgage market has bounced back from its January slowdown, with one market indicator showing strong sales in February. Mortgage aggregator AFG reported yesterday that February volumes were up 48 per cent on January's numbers, and on a par with the strongest months of last year.AFG's mortgage brokers wrote 7000 loans in February, compared with 4736 in January. In the peak month last year, November, the group wrote 7492 loans.The value of loans written in February was $2.8 billion - up from $1.8 billion in January.One notable feature of AFG's latest data is that the average home loan broke the $400,000 barrier for the first time. This is more than one third higher than the average reported in the comprehensive data produced by the Australian Bureau of Statistics and serves as a reminder of the skew in AFG data. The major banks' share of the mortgage market fell from 79 per cent in January to 76.1 per cent last month. However, this figure tends to jump around in AFG's surveys (it has been as high as 82 per cent and as low as 75.7 per cent over the past six months).