Mortgage Rate Price Tracker 🏠📉🔍 (FEB 2 – 13)
Monitoring the change in price of specific mortgage rates
Included in this post are the following:
THE TRACKER 🔭
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Most mortgages are sold into mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and the price of these bonds determines rates for all banks and lenders.
However, mortgage rates DO NOT rise or fall. Instead, the price of each rate changes while the rates available to you remain the same.
The Mortgage Rate Price Tracker (MRPT) illustrates this dynamic by showing how the price of each rate changed within the time series.
The higher the rate, the lower the fee (points). Some higher rates pay a rebate; this is illustrated on the tracker with negative (-) points.
When the “total change” is negative it means a reduction in the price of the rate.
The MRPT is a “rate and loan program” specific example of the LendZen Index, which monitors a much broader set of rates and mortgage bond coupons.
Both are effective for visualizing how the PRICE of mortgage rates has changed, while the LendZen Index is published daily at LendZen.substack.com
WEEK 2 📉
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Since the LendZen Index has a variety of time series, the MRPT will focus on just the current month’s activity.
Attached are the results for February Week 2.
The rates in the VA 30 tracker now include 4.75%
You can also explore the results for Week 1 on this previous Substack post.
OBSERVATION:
Noticeable improvements across all products, with lower-end conventional rates seeing the biggest 2-week improvement, down 60 – 100 bps in price.
RATE RECAP ⏪
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It was a week of high stakes and “What the heck happened” moments, but in the end mortgage rates survived what could have been a nightmare for bonds with two major economic reports packed into the same week.
After no major surprises from Wednesday’s Non-Farm Payroll employment data, nor Friday’s CPI inflation data, mortgage rates drifted back towards to best levels of 2026.
The trend shift seems to be driven more by ongoing risk-off trade flows than the data itself.
The set-up for bonds looks promising for the rest of the month.
With no FOMC meeting in February, markets will instead focus on the Fed Minutes (Feb 18) and PCE inflation (Feb 20).
Personal Consumption Expenditures is the Fed’s preferred inflation data and is followed the last Friday of the month by another inflationary gauge, Producer Price Index (PPI).
These reports are likely to follow the script from Friday’s CPI.
Insight into next week’s events, including the latest Rate Impact Calendar, will be posted in Sunday’s Week Ahead.
Meanwhile, the latest Lock-O-Meter risk scores and detailed rate lock recommendations with be posted Monday in the Data Deluge.
Thanks for reading.
If you want to shop real-time mortgage rates and get instant qualification results without providing any contact information visit LendZen.com
LendZen provides a fully automated mortgage shopping experience that gives you anonymous access to all mortgage rates with full transparency of costs upfront as bond prices change.
DISCLOSURES
LendZen Inc. is an equal opportunity mortgage lender, NMLS 375788.
