A look at new home construction

Despite the hotter temperatures this week there is one thing that is cooling off this summer and that is new home construction unfortunately. Housing Starts dropped 6% month-over-month in May to 1,277,000 units which was both below expectations and the lowest figure seen in 4 years. Building Permits for future construction also declined month over […]

Job report for May comes in higher than expected

May’s job growth came in well above forecasts, as the BLS reported that 272K new jobs were created. However, revisions to the data for March and April shaved 15K jobs from those months combined. In addition, the unemployment rate rose from 3.9% to 4%, which is the highest since January 2022. This report caused rates […]

Home appreciation year over year

I wanted to take a break from the typical mortgage rate breakdown to show you a chart that really stuck out to me today. The chart shows U.S. house prices rose 6.6 percent between the first quarter of 2023 and the first quarter of 2024, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) House Price […]

Jobs report to the rescue

Last report I mentioned that the only hope for lower interest rates is a weaking labor market. On Friday we got the results we were looking for. It wasn’t a bad number by any means, there were 175,000 jobs created which was much lower than the expected 240,000. The unemployment rate ticked up to 3.9% […]

Rate expectations

Going into this year the market was expecting about 6 rate cuts and the Fed was predicting 3 cuts. After almost four months where are we? The Fed is still expecting 3 cuts while the market is around 2 cuts and some are even whispering about no cuts at all. A lot can change after […]