Mon, Feb 8 2016, 5:43 PM
Forget oil--mostly. There's a new bad boy in town over the weekend, and he's making just the sort of mess that Treasuries and MBS like to see. To ...
Mon, Feb 8 2016, 5:08 PM
Mortgage rates dropped significantly today, officially hitting the lowest levels in almost exactly 1 year. For most lenders, that means a conventio...
Fri, Feb 5 2016, 8:25 AM
First thing's first: NFP always reserves the right to move markets, even on occasions when it arguably shouldn't matter. Over the years, so many trad...
Fri, Feb 5 2016, 5:54 PM
Markets were confused by today's jobs data--at least bond markets were. The 151k vs 190k miss on headline NFP was ostensibly offset by the improvem...
Fri, Feb 5 2016, 4:49 PM
Mortgage rates were mostly unchanged today, though a few lenders were microscopically higher in cost . That's an uncommon result for the day of th...
Fri, Feb 5 2016, 2:39 PM
Credit available was apparently slightly lower in January
than in February, the third straight month that the Mortgage Bankers
Associations' (MBA'...
Fri, Feb 5 2016, 1:32 PM
"How much does it cost to buy sixty female pigs and forty male deer? One hundred sows and bucks!" Money? I continue to be amazed at this stat: last y...
Thu, Feb 4 2016, 12:22 PM
The percentage of total home sales transactions that are
completed in cash continues to decline on an annual basis as distressed homes
become less a...
Thu, Feb 4 2016, 10:02 AM
Lenders
should know that the FDIC indicates it expects banks to evaluate and
manage cyber risk as it does any other business risk and to do so a...
Thu, Feb 4 2016, 8:20 AM
It used to be that the first Thursday of every month provided a fairly reliable chance of volatility . That was during the days when Europe was an e...
Thu, Feb 4 2016, 5:18 PM
Today was a so-called "inside day" for bond markets, meaning prices and yields remained INSIDE yesterday's range of prices and yields. Economic dat...
Thu, Feb 4 2016, 4:35 PM
Mortgage rates held their ground at 8-month lows today. This time around, it was far less eventful than yesterday's session, which saw lenders chan...
Wed, Feb 3 2016, 9:08 AM
I
spent some time at the Texas Mortgage Banker's event earlier this week
in Houston, and some of the discussion revolved around another refi
bo...
Wed, Feb 3 2016, 8:29 AM
Mortgage application volume during the week ended January 29 was again either
disappointing or much improved depending on whether one viewed it on ...
Wed, Feb 3 2016, 7:34 AM
Yesterday's morning notes laid out an ominous technical comparison to last January and we promptly proceeded to have the best rally of the year. Ther...
Wed, Feb 3 2016, 6:24 PM
Freddie Mac's economists are expressing concerns about what
they see as economic headwinds revealed by some recently released
indicators. In thei...
Wed, Feb 3 2016, 6:19 PM
Two days ago, we were able to refer to Monday as the best day of the year, as long as you forget about the Friday before it. Today is the new 'best ...
Wed, Feb 3 2016, 4:54 PM
Mortgage rates had a far more tumultuous day despite ultimately hanging on to the lowest levels in more than 8 months. Whether you wanted to be h...
Tue, Feb 2 2016, 10:55 AM
Once again a report on home price changes indicates that appreciation
has not yet slowed . CoreLogic issued a
report on its Home Price Index for D...
Tue, Feb 2 2016, 9:14 AM
Where
does the penalty money that the CFPB collects go? And is it correctly
disbursed? The Office of the Inspector General (OIG) has some thought...
Tue, Feb 2 2016, 7:34 AM
When things have been unexpectedly as good as they have been for as long as they have been, one of the side-effects can be increased anxiety about the...
Tue, Feb 2 2016, 5:42 PM
Surprise! It's another mega-rally day. Depending on your yardstick, this is the 5th or 6th mega rally so far this year. Considering there have on...
Tue, Feb 2 2016, 4:35 PM
Mortgage rates only paused for a brief moment of reflection yesterday before continuing with 2016's trend of improvement. Today's gains bring them ...
Mon, Feb 1 2016, 12:26 PM
Black Knight Financial Services took close-up looks at both
home affordability and the recent surge in cash-out refinancing in its new Mortgage ...
Mon, Feb 1 2016, 12:13 PM
Construction spending scrambled back into positive territory
by a tiny bit in December, gaining 0.1 percent from November's level to an
estimated ...
Mon, Feb 1 2016, 8:34 AM
February
already? Ah, Valentine's Day - remember as a kid when your classmates
would hand out a 5 word card to every classmate and you received 20...
Mon, Feb 1 2016, 7:33 AM
The weeks that contain the first Friday of any given month have a flavor all their own. Several of the month's most important pieces of economic da...
Mon, Feb 1 2016, 5:41 PM
In a way, today was the best sort of losing day for bond markets. If you factor out last Friday, today was the best trading day for bond markets in...
Mon, Feb 1 2016, 4:33 PM
Mortgage rates were in line with the best levels in 8 months as of last Friday. Although they moved slightly higher to begin the new week, today ...
Fri, Jan 29 2016, 11:00 AM
Since
its Friday let's veer away from mortgages for a quick moment. With the
recent rash of celebrity and music deaths, including the Jefferson
...
Fri, Jan 29 2016, 7:33 AM
You can't step 2 feet out your front door in 2016 without being pelted by news regarding the close correlation between stocks, bonds and oil. Heck, I...
Fri, Jan 29 2016, 5:11 PM
For the end of any given day, bond markets closed at their best levels since April. If we look at only month-end closing levels, today was the best ...
Fri, Jan 29 2016, 4:39 PM
Mortgage rates were at 3 month lows yesterday and today have moved in line with 8-month lows. For most lenders, there was a day or 2 in October tha...
Fri, Jan 29 2016, 2:59 PM
Are the big companies who have purchased large number of
single-family homes over the last few years looking for a quick profit or are
they in the...
Thu, Jan 28 2016, 10:39 AM
And we have a trifecta!
All three of the home sales indicators for December have now come in
positive, although the latest, pending sales, did so l...
Thu, Jan 28 2016, 10:27 AM
Zillow
is predicting that the rental market will cool down this year. Median
U.S. rents grew at a 3.3 percent annual pace in December, to $1,381...
Thu, Jan 28 2016, 8:26 AM
If we take the awesome part of 2016 for granted and simply focus on our most timely challenges, we find bond markets struggling to make any further im...
Thu, Jan 28 2016, 5:41 PM
Stocks gained a bit of ground today. Oil prices were significantly higher--building on a strong 3-day bounce. But on both accounts, bond markets d...
Thu, Jan 28 2016, 4:42 PM
Mortgage rates moved down modestly today, but it was enough to bring them to the lowest levels seen in exactly 3 months. There were only a few days...
Thu, Jan 28 2016, 2:00 PM
There was a slight uptick in the market
share of distressed home sales in November.
Sales of lender-owned houses (REO) and short sales accounted fo...
Wed, Jan 27 2016, 10:41 AM
New home sales more or less blew away the experts in
December, coming in at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 544,000 units. The Census Bureau ...
Wed, Jan 27 2016, 9:31 AM
There
are traveler trailers and motor homes but have you heard of a Home RV?
EscapeHomes owner Dan Dobrowoski has created a tiny home, the Travele...
Wed, Jan 27 2016, 9:09 AM
Refinancing continued to buoy up mortgage application volume during the
week ended January 22 as interest rates fell back to levels last seen in th...
Wed, Jan 27 2016, 7:33 AM
Today brings one of those Fed policy announcements where we can already be reasonably sure of the outcome, but where the subtleties could still prov...
Wed, Jan 27 2016, 6:10 PM
Today's Fed announcement was decidedly more downbeat than the previous iteration and markets reacted accordingly. There was never any real chance t...
Wed, Jan 27 2016, 5:30 PM
Mortgage rates pulled off a come-from-behind victory following today's Fed Announcement. This time around, the Fed wasn't at all likely to make a...
Wed, Jan 27 2016, 2:05 PM
(NOTE: removals are struck-through and additions are underlined)
Information received since the Federal Open Market Committee met in October Dece...
Tue, Jan 26 2016, 10:34 AM
No matter how much it is predicted, home
price gains are still failing to decelerate.
All three of the S&P/Case-Shiller indices were slightly highe...
Tue, Jan 26 2016, 10:18 AM
What does Florida have that the rest of us don't? The highest percentage of cash buyers according to Zillow's latest research.
There are plenty ...
Tue, Jan 26 2016, 8:17 AM
Last week ended with bond markets looking like they were at risk of bigger, longer-term bounce back toward higher rates. The catalyst was/is the "ris...
