The 30-year mortgage rate shot up the day after the Federal Reserve cut interest rates.
Hours after the Federal Reserve cut its benchmark interest rate on Wednesday by 25 basis points, mortgage rates ticked up 9 basis points.
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The Fed announced Wednesday that it would trim its key policy rate by a quarter of a percentage point, bringing it to the range of 4% to 4.25%. Around the time of the announcement, Mortgage News Daily, a website that posts daily updates on rates, crashed - possibly the result of people flocking to the site to see how mortgage rates reacted. The company told MarketWatch it was looking into why the site was down that afternoon.
Mortgage News Daily later reported that the 30-year rate went up by 9 basis points (0.09%) to 6.22% on Wednesday. On Thursday, it reported that the 30-year rate had gone up by 15 more basis points, to 6.37%.
In contrast, a report by Freddie Mac measuring weekly averages for the 30-year rate found that mortgage rates fell to the lowest level in 12 months on Thursday. That's because Freddie Mac's report gathered information prior to and after the Fed's decision was announced. The weekly report doesn't survey lenders, but is based on actual mortgage applications to lenders across the country that are sent to Freddie Mac.
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Mortgage rates aren't tied to the Fed's interest-rate moves. Instead, they typically fall in advance of a Fed rate cut, as MarketWatch has reported, because bond investors are trying to anticipate where the central bank will go. Mortgage rates are priced off the 10-year Treasury note BX:TMUBMUSD10Y by adding a spread.
Hence, the 10-year Treasury yield is a better gauge of how mortgage rates will move - and the 10-year yield was trending higher Thursday.
Mortgage rates have decoupled from the Fed's benchmark / targets, basically, because fiscal policy and the overall economic outlook are so bad that traditional monetary policy is no longer effective.
This is generally what economists would call 'a bad sign'.
Myself, I would go so far as 'a very bad sign.'
My condolences to anyone who confused their local new/used home salesperson with a qualified economist, if they told you, and you believed, something like 'Fed rate cuts will lower mortgage rates!"
Cheaper borrowing for billionaires and corporations, and more expensive housing for everyone else. What a time to be alive
This also means that home prices, their actual prices, have to go down, if they actually want to sell.
But, the market could remain half frozen, as it roughly has been for a while.
I saw another report, I wouldn't be able to post it as a news article because it isn't a news article... basically, in the last month, something like 50% of houses that get pulled off market (delisted) are being pulled off by incredulous boomers who can't believe that no one can afford to buy their house at the price that 'they think its worth'.
So... yeah, basically, the Boomers get to enjoy a housing crash right as its time for them to retire and downsize, after spending the last ~20 years making it near impossible for anyone currently under 40 to be able to afford a home.
Great work, thanks everyone.
Wave bye bye to your 'oh, we'll leave you the house' inheritance.
Yeah the uh... median new home buyer age is now like... 38.
It was 28, in the 1980s.
People who own a home will adjust the prices to try and sell them. Not willingly, and not quickly, but if they have to change they'll take a hit. Who won't sell are all the corporations that bought up everything when it was a hot market going up. They can afford to sit on an unoccupied house for a long time waiting to at least recapture the investment they made.
You have it backwards.
Private Equity Firms who basically bought houses to speculate with, planning on selling them to a family?
They already did a bunch of price cuts in the last quarter or two.
They arguably kicked this all off from 'things don't look so good' to 'oh fuck, blaring klaxons and red lights'.
Why?
Because they borrowed the money to buy the houses with, using access to credit sources 'families' don't have.
They're also a lot better at data analysis than 'families'.
Basically, its the stock market 'smart money vs dumb money' dynamic.
They cut prices first because they know a small loss is better than a large loss.
'Families' tend to not understand that.
The other thing thats fun is ... PE just converted a lot of those homes they would not be able to sell at the price they wanted... to rentals! For whole families!
Yay cashflow!
This (and other things) is actually already starting to slowly drive down rental rates for apartments and such in areas where they did that more heavily.
Uh but yeah, sorry, you got it backwards, PE firms have bigger pockets and can do math objectively better than most families: A slight ding to ROI is better than a massive one.
With families, its more of a personal existential crisis situation, with PE, its literally their dayjob.
Yeah, nobody in the 'current quarter profits are all that matters' world is gonna sit on a house for a decade in hopes of an eventual return, taking losses for that whole decade on those properties in the mean time.