Wed, Apr 5 2017, 8:25 AM
The volume of purchase mortgages continued to increase during the week ended March 31, but steadily shrinking refinance numbers once again pulled over...
Wed, Apr 5 2017, 4:42 PM
Mortgage rates were noticeably higher to begin the day, but most lenders offered mid-day improvements after the release of the hotly-anticipated Fed M...
Wed, Apr 5 2017, 4:40 PM
Coming into today, we had two key options as far as potential market movers were concerned: economic data and the Fed Minutes. On the data front, ADP...
Tue, Apr 4 2017, 11:04 AM
CoreLogic says house price increases picked up the pace again in February. After the rate of appreciation dipped from 7.2 percent for the 12 months en...
Tue, Apr 4 2017, 9:11 AM
How much free time do you have? Not much? You’re not alone, as this story points out, "The rich were meant to have the most leisure time. The working ...
Tue, Apr 4 2017, 8:55 AM
Yesterday's bond market activity suggested that traders definitely had some sort of agenda that went beyond a mere punching of the clock. Even with C...
Tue, Apr 4 2017, 5:40 PM
Coming off of yesterday's excellent performance, today's bond market selling-spree felt jarring --probably more jarring than it actually was. Right ...
Tue, Apr 4 2017, 5:02 PM
Mortgage rates were steady to slightly lower today, even though bond market movement suggested a move higher. That's interesting because mortgage rate...
Mon, Apr 3 2017, 10:16 AM
The conditional prepayment rate (CPR), the annualized percentage of total mortgage principal that borrowers prepay on a pool of loans in a given time ...
Mon, Apr 3 2017, 9:33 AM
Welcome to Q2! I am attending the NYMBA conference for a few days, but 1,300 miles south, in Florida (aka "God's waiting room"), folks are talking "re...
Mon, Apr 3 2017, 9:26 AM
Remember March 15th's Fed Announcement? That was the one where the entire free world was utterly and completely convinced that the Fed would hike s...
Mon, Apr 3 2017, 5:37 PM
From an analytical standpoint, today's trading session was not well-behaved or easy to assess (I saw several iterations of "no one has any idea what...
Mon, Apr 3 2017, 4:58 PM
Mortgage rates fell fairly quickly today as investors adjusted bond market holdings for the new month (higher demand for bonds coincides with lower ra...
Mon, Apr 3 2017, 1:42 PM
Spending on residential buildings fared better than overall construction spending in February. The U.S. Census Bureau said on Monday that expenditures...
Fri, Mar 31 2017, 11:39 AM
After gathering little attention for nearly a decade, the two GSEs, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are making news on several fronts. Two developments in ...
Fri, Mar 31 2017, 9:47 AM
Let’s end the week with a non-mortgage question, but one that you mathaletes will enjoy. What would happen if you were hit by a penny falling from a s...
Fri, Mar 31 2017, 9:07 AM
While there are several economic reports that have market-moving power today, the bigger issue for bond markets may be the technical battle that's b...
Fri, Mar 31 2017, 4:59 PM
Mortgage rate were unchanged to slightly lower today. Once again, the actual change you see will depend heavily on the lender in question. Most are fa...
Fri, Mar 31 2017, 4:56 PM
Month/Quarter-end bond buying was nowhere to be seen until today. It can provide a mild but determined positive trend in bond markets that transcends...
Thu, Mar 30 2017, 10:01 AM
Appraised values are key in underwriting a mortgage loan and CoreLogic says one of the challenges is to make sure the information an appraisal provide...
Thu, Mar 30 2017, 9:48 AM
On this date in 1867, 150 years ago, a few years before I started trading MBS, Seward’s Folly was created. Put another way, on this date a treaty was ...
Thu, Mar 30 2017, 9:32 AM
With 10yr yields having made it close to 2017's lower range in the most recent rally, the burden of proof is on bond bulls to come up with j ustificat...
Thu, Mar 30 2017, 6:02 PM
For all of the apparent drama and volatility experienced during the past 2 weeks, it's easy to overlook just how narrow the range has been. There's ...
Thu, Mar 30 2017, 5:20 PM
For the third day in a row, day-over-day mortgage rate movement depends heavily on the lender. That means some lenders will be in noticeably better sh...
Wed, Mar 29 2017, 10:29 AM
Pending home sales in February surprised everyone with an unexpected jump of 5.5 percent . The National Association of Realtors® said its Pending Home...
Wed, Mar 29 2017, 9:47 AM
Back in December the Urban Institute (UI) put a number on the much maligned but somewhat amorphous term "tight credit." It maintained that, between 20...
Wed, Mar 29 2017, 9:39 AM
The average residential loan file has 367,000 documents - and each one must be verified by the underwriter. Okay, just kidding. But every Boeing 737 (...
Wed, Mar 29 2017, 8:46 AM
We characterized yesterday's bond market weakness as a simple and somewhat logical correction. The initial move was Monday morning's rally that was...
Wed, Mar 29 2017, 8:17 AM
Mortgage applications saw a third straight decline in volume during the week ended March 24. The Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) said its Market Co...
Wed, Mar 29 2017, 5:59 PM
There have been two back-to-back "unwind" trades in bond markets. The stage was set by Monday morning's rally which was in response to an absence o...
Wed, Mar 29 2017, 2:00 PM
Compared to yesterday, today's mortgage rates are a moving target depending on the lender. Some are better. Some are worse. On average, rates are unch...
Tue, Mar 28 2017, 10:34 AM
Mortgage lenders contacted in the first quarter of 2017 by Fannie Mae's Mortgage Lender Sentiment Survey expressed the highest expectations for the ec...
Tue, Mar 28 2017, 10:22 AM
The S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller U.S. National Home Price Index for January ran counter to other major prices indices in that it continued to show home ...
Tue, Mar 28 2017, 10:08 AM
There has been a lot of recent activity regarding the government sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac swirling around and reported ...
Tue, Mar 28 2017, 9:39 AM
As an industry, we continue to be reminded of a small minority’s wrongdoings. The latest example comes from New York where a Copiague man was sentence...
Tue, Mar 28 2017, 8:47 AM
Today brings the week's first major economic data with 10am Consumer Confidence serving as the headliner. Before that, we'll get an update on home ...
Tue, Mar 28 2017, 7:51 PM
Just when you thought you'd seen the last of the healthcare bill drama , it comes roaring back. Well, at least it felt like a roar. In retrospect, ...
Tue, Mar 28 2017, 2:06 PM
Just one day after hitting the lowest levels in more than a month, mortgage rates bounced higher today. For all intents and purposes, rates fell on Mo...
Mon, Mar 27 2017, 1:58 PM
Housing remains in high demand in most of the nation, but the housing recovery looks increasingly uneven, depending on location. Whether buyers are sh...
Mon, Mar 27 2017, 11:12 AM
The third major home price index released January data released on Monday and it became the third to post a deceleration in the rate of price apprecia...
Mon, Mar 27 2017, 11:06 AM
This week involves a fair amount of cross-country travel for me (California, Washington DC, Florida, and Utah), and as it turns out Wells Fargo is the...
Mon, Mar 27 2017, 10:08 AM
The biggest questions for Monday comes from financial markets and is directed towards politicians in Washington. Are we done obsessing over the healt...
Mon, Mar 27 2017, 7:07 PM
Today could have gone two ways. We could have come to find out that Friday's "delay" in the vote on the healthcare bill was an actual delay, or we ...
Mon, Mar 27 2017, 6:41 PM
Mortgage rates improved today, hitting the lowest levels in more than a month. Bond markets (which underlie mortgage rates) generally improved last we...
Fri, Mar 24 2017, 10:51 AM
The share of homes sold for cash fell to the lowest level in nearly a decade in full-year 2016. CoreLogic said that 32.1 percent of all home sales in ...
Fri, Mar 24 2017, 10:47 AM
It wasn't exactly bait and switch, maybe unlawful substitution is closer to the mark. Whatever, Experian, the credit reporting company, has been handi...
Fri, Mar 24 2017, 10:22 AM
In legal news, Experian , one of the nation's three major credit reporting bureaus, misled consumers by telling them that the credit scores they purch...
Fri, Mar 24 2017, 9:47 AM
The healthcare bill is all anyone can talk about (here's one recent article from Reuters). We rarely see such an abrupt coalescence of market focus...
Fri, Mar 24 2017, 4:37 PM
More than a few bond bulls out there (those are folks who want rates to go lower!) were eager for the vote to take place on the healthcare bill that...
Fri, Mar 24 2017, 3:22 PM
While some lenders were slightly better or worse versus yesterday, mortgage rates were unchanged on average today. This isn't much of surprise conside...
