In this solo weekly market update, Jordan Keck reminds lenders and borrowers to account for the Memorial Day holiday (May 26) when scheduling closings, notes a modest rise in mortgage rates from 6.87% to 6.92% with recent volatility, and explains the mandatory FHA engineer certification for manufactured homes on their own land, contrasting it with VA and conventional loan requirements. He critiques sensational headlines about Redfin’s 13% pending‑sale cancellation rate by showing it mirrors prior years and pre‑COVID levels. Keck then details the growing impact of tariffs on logistics: truck bookings down 6% (large) and 33% (medium) and shipping container cancellations soaring from 30,000 to 370,000 in six weeks. He cites Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant’s optimism about a US‑China trade de‑escalation and potential bank deregulation that could lower lending costs. The housing market segment covers March new‑home sales up 7.4% (annualized 724k) driven by the South, a record inventory of 503,000 new homes (most under construction), and existing‑home sales falling 5.9% versus expectations, attributed to higher rates and West‑coast fire disruptions. Keck closes by inviting questions and topic suggestions.
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Good morning and happy Friday. Jordan Keck here, your lender buddy, with your weekly market update. I want to also remind you, especially as you're writing contracts now looking at closing the end of May, that May 26th, that Monday, is Memorial Day, a federal holiday. So you want to make sure you factor that into your closing dates. So hopefully that's going to be a Good heads up for you to looking ahead. With market rates moving up a little bit here this week from 6.87 last week to 6.92 today. That being said, there's been a lot of volatility. We have seen some improvement this week. We were even higher to start the week off, but today, by the time the day is finished, it looks like we should be back to better than where we were last week and hopefully continuing that trend. A lot of uncertainty in the market. We're going to talk about some of that today with trade wars and tariffs. But again, we're just kind of taking it a day at a time. As far as our weekly mortgage tip, wanted to chat through manufactured home engineer certifications for the foundation. So this is something that's going to be needed on every single FHA loan by default when doing a loan on a manufactured home on its own land. Now, VA and conventional, they don't require them by default, so it's usually going to be required in situations where the appraiser calls it out as required. And typically that's going to be if there's any modifications that have been done to the home. Now, the most common modifications are putting on a deck, putting on a garage, something like that, that might put strain on the actual structure of the house itself. And the most common thing that I see get called out on those engineer certifications is an awning that is not self-supporting. So if you've got an awning on, you know, kind of a patio cover on the side of a deck, And let's say the deck isn't connected, but the awning itself is attached to the structure of the home because the foundation wasn't designed for that. Engineer's going to call it out and say there needs to be beams put in so that that deck is fully self-supporting. Another common one is going to be tie-downs for the foundation. So if you don't have sufficient tie-downs on the foundation anchored into the ground attached to the frame of that home, And that's going to be called out on an engineer certification. That being said, if you're doing conventional or VA and there hasn't been any modifications, even if there aren't tie-downs, that's not certainly something the appraiser is going to call out. So you might be okay without those if you don't need the engineer certification. Again, a lot of this is case by case, but on FHA, it is required every time per FHA guidelines. If you have specific questions, let me know. Run into this a lot. As far as our news for the week, starting off, Redfin came out and there was some big headlines about them reporting that 13% of all pending home sales for March were canceled. The interesting thing they didn't mention though is that this is the same number from March of 2024, and March of 2023 was even higher. So right now it is getting a lot of headlines, but this really isn't any deviation from the norm. Prior to COVID, it was still above 11%, So yes, it was lower and we have seen higher as a result of the higher interest rates, just the new market we're in. But this has basically been the standard for the last few years. So be very careful the headlines that you pay attention to on this one. Yes, it has gone up since COVID but not to alarming levels, and there hasn't really been a change the last couple of years. Next, as far as the impacts that we're starting to see from tariffs here, we're seeing truck and shipping cancellations continuing to rise, as well as bookings being down quite a bit. Truck bookings for March were down 6% for large trucks, down 33% for medium-sized trucks, and this was ahead of the tariffs. So we're likely going to see that even continue further lower with the result of those coming into play. Cancellations were at their highest number in 2 years, and shipping figures for April show that the number of canceled shipping containers went from 30,000 6 weeks ago to 370,000. About 11 times more. And the biggest impact on this, of course, is the tariffs. As it becomes more expensive to import specific goods, you're worried about cost, supply chain, all of the reduced demand that is being seen in a big way in some of these updates here, some of these economics. Next, the Treasury Secretary did come out though and say that he believes that there will be a de-escalation between US and China trade tensions. So the Secretary, Scott Bessant, said that he believes both countries have their best interests in mind to be able to resolve the issues because we rely on each other so much for so many different things. Effectively, right now with the tariffs, it's the same result as a trade embargo. So being able to hopefully help resolve those can get us back into a good spot economically. He also spoke about bank deregulation, which he believes will get done, which could help reduce the cost of regulating banks. The cost of their compliance and could end up reducing the lending costs and help reduce interest rates as a result of that. Still remains to be seen if and when that may end up happening. But again, looking at good chances for that in the future. Next up, new home sales. So sales for brand new homes rose 7.4% in March, which is much stronger than estimates. It came in at a 724,000 annualized pace. And February was also revised higher from 1.8% to 3.1%, making this an even stronger report than just the headline number. A lot of the strength did come from the South, where home prices are lower, which brought down the median home price to about 2% to $404,000, not because home prices are decreasing, but because the mix of homes sold erred more on the side of lower-priced homes, just moving that median home price, median home price down a little bit because of that. There is also likely a slowdown because the fires that happened in the West, in California specifically, and most of that put homes on pause that were in higher price point. So that could have skewed it a little bit higher, but because those weren't going to be closing, you know, of course skewed more towards the South and those lower home prices. At the end of March, there was about 503,000 new homes for sale, which is the highest level since November of 2007. But keep in mind, only 119,000 of those were actually completed. 272,000 are under construction and 112,000 aren't even started. Next up, and the last piece for existing home sales, they fell for March 5.9%. Pretty big drop considering there was still a drop expected, but only at 3%. So about 2.9% miss on that headline number. The previous report was also revised a little bit higher from 4.2 to 4.4, but still only 0.2% different, not nearly enough to make up for the almost 3% miss on the headline. Sales fell likely due to higher rates from shoppers in January and February when we saw those higher rates, as well as from the fires in the West, which ended up postponing closings. If those ended up moving forward again, a lot of those, though, I mean, if you were looking at buying or selling one of those homes, it's gone. That's not going to come back. But there are a number of sales that can still move forward and did move forward. They just had to be delayed. So it'd be interesting to see what happens in our next report for April, if we see an increased number because some of those sales rolled, or if it's going to be continually down as a result. As always, hopefully this is helpful. Let me know if there's any topics you'd like to see me cover more in depth, and for specific situations, reach out. I'll always happy to help. Have a great weekend. We'll see you next time.
