Mortgage rates rose for the 10th time in the past 11 days today, bringing them very close to highest levels in 3 years. You'd have to go back to April 30th, 2014 to see the average lender offering higher rates. The most common conventional 30yr fixed quote is easily up to 4.375% on top tier scenarios with a growing number of lenders moving up to 4.5%. Despite that gloomy assessment, there were no new major developments causing bond markets to weaken (weaker bond markets imply lower bond prices and higher rates). Rather, this has simply been the trend since late February when several Fed speake... (read more)

Mortgage rates held steady today, despite a key report from the Labor Department showing stronger-than-expected job creation in February. Typically, a strong jobs report is bad for rates. This one likely would have been bad as well, but markets got advance notice from another report earlier in the week. Remember Wednesday's ADP data? It thoroughly trounced the 190k expectation, coming in at 298k. Given that the ADP data attempts to track/predict the Labor Department's report, rates were able to rise preemptively before this morning's data ever came out. With the official numbers not quite as s... (read more)