Housing crash delayed (again) as mortgage rates hold near lows 🏠📈💰
The Week Ahead
WEEK AHEAD 🗓️
----------------
This week’s main focus will be home price data, specifically the Case-Shiller index.
Although reported with a two-month lag, the Shiller index is one of the longest running and most widely monitored home price metrics.
The U.S. home price story is a mixed bag, with markets below the sun belt seeing modest price declines last year while the northern states have been more resilient.
Since 2020 national home prices have increased at an annualized rate of 7.1%.
Current expectations are that the December data (Feb report) will show modest gains (+1.5%), similar to those from November (+1.4%).
Despite the disappointing Pending Home Sales data from last week, the 300-bps of mortgage rate PRICE improvement since last summer has likely provided timely support to home prices as inventory still remains low.
Shiller’s month-over-month numbers will be more heavily scrutinized by the housing bears, who have been trying to forecast a housing crash since 2020.
Regardless this is not going to be the report that vindicates their stale predictions.
This week also has plenty of non-housing related data, including Factory Orders and the Chicago Business Barometer (PMI).
Two reports this week will be used as an inflationary gauge, Chicago Fed National Activity Index and the Producer Price Index.
The latter is more meaningful, and caps off the week along with construction spending.
PPI is likely to follow the same script as other recent inflation data sets, CPI and PCE.
However PPI is more forward-looking, as an increase in producer prices generally gets passed on to the consumer.
Because of the uneventful sideways grind last week there will be no Data Deluge, but tariff tantrums and other exogenous events (Mexico) could kickstart bond market volatility again – stay tuned for updates throughout the week.
In the meantime, check out this week’s Mortgage Rate Price Tracker for a closer look at how specific mortgage rates have changed.
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.
You can also request an official Loan Estimate for the exact loan you created and save your scenario to revisit your rate options daily with one-click.
LendZen Inc. is an equal opportunity mortgage lender, NMLS 375788.