Market Update- Rates, home prices, and jobs reports (JOLTS, ADP, and BLS)

Good morning and happy Friday. Jordan Keck here, your lender buddy, with your weekly market update kicking off. I do want to make sure that you're aware we do have our first Jordan Keck book club here. We're going to be meeting this next week. There are two options. I have a Facebook group, so if you didn't have the details on it, there's going to be a link down below to register for that. And we have one on Tuesday the 9th, one on Wednesday the 10th. Tuesday is gonna be at 11:30 on Zoom, and then Wednesday is going to be at 8:30 AM at Broadway Coffee House in person. So choose your own adventure, whichever one you'd like. The book we're going through is Unreasonable Hospitality. We're covering the first 7 chapters, and if you haven't already read the book but you're interested, show up anyway. It's a great chance to be able to get together with other people in person. Talk about a phenomenal book, a lot of fun to enjoy, and we'll be meeting again for the next 2 months after this, going through the rest of this book. So love to have you there. Check out the details below. Feel free to stop by. And then again, let me know for the details and the invite if you want the Zoom link version of it. Happy to send that over as well. As far as— excuse me— as far as interest rates this week are moving up a little bit. Last week at 6.91%, this week at 7.01% according to Mortgage News Daily. And as a reminder, this is an average of lenders across the country for top-tier scenarios, typically like $700,000 purchase price, 25% down payment, primary residence, great credit. So it's not going to hit everybody, but it does give you an idea of where interest rates are moving from one week to the next. And as far as our weekly mortgage tip, wanted to cover a scenario that came up this week that was a new one for me, and it was having a manufactured home as an ADU on the property. Now that is allowable. FHA has even gotten a lot more flexible on their guidelines. They allow rental income from an ADU to be counted, whereas in the past that hadn't always been the case for it. But the interesting thing that came up was a scenario where the ADU was actually below 400 square feet, it was about 380 square feet. And the interesting thing is, depending on whether you're looking at Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac's guidelines or FHA guidelines, all of them will say that if you're financing just a manufactured home, it has to be at least 400 square feet. They also all say that a manufactured home can be an ADU. But the interesting thing is, can you have a manufactured home as an ADU that's less than 300 square feet? Honestly, Freddie Mac is pretty clear that you can't, but FHA or Fannie Mae and FHA are both a little bit less clear. And so most lenders that I was chatting through, it seemed to be in the consensus that if a manufactured home is an ADU, it has to be at least 400 square feet in order for it to be financeable. Again, there's some room for interpretation on this one. It's a little bit strange, but want to at least give you the heads up that if you're looking at properties, either as listing them or potentially buying them, that have a manufactured home as an ADU, want to just double-check the square footage on that one. If it's over 400, you should be fine. If If it's less than that, there might be some problems you potentially run into. So if you run into that or anything else funky you're not sure about, as always, give me a call. Happy to chat through scenarios with you and make sure it's smooth from the get-go so you don't run into unexpected surprises down the road. Next up here, CoreLogic's Home Price Insights report for February came out showing that prices moved up very strongly, up 0.7%, almost a full percent there for the month over month from January. And this is after falling 0.1% in January. So really strong showing. And they forecasted a flat number for February and again came in really strong. Now prices are showing up 5.5% per year, which is a slight decline from the previous month of 5.8%, but still 5.5% up in the market we've been in. Very, very strong showing. Next up, the JOLTS job openings labor report for February came in showing 8.76 million job openings. Slightly above the number from last month. January's number was revised 115,000 lower, making it appear to show an increase month over month when, if you just looked at the headline numbers, would have been pretty much level between the two. The quit rate remained low at 2.2% for the fourth month in a row, which is the lowest since 2018 when we remove COVID. And this is a potential indicator of labor market weakness, because when employees are feeling really good about their job prospects, they may be hired away towards other companies for better pay. But right now, less quitting means not as confident about their prospects for a new company. March's ADP report also came out showing 184,000 jobs created for the month, above the 150,000 that was expected. The February report was also revised higher from 140,000 to 155,000, adding more fuel to the fire hire. And the ADP showed wages for job stayers up 5.1%, which is the same as last month. But the interesting one was job switchers, those who have changed jobs in the last year. They saw a 10% increase in their income year over year, well above the 7.6% number that we saw in February. So big jump up in March for job switchers. And lastly here, the BLS jobs report. It's all about jobs this week. This came in for March showing 303,000 jobs created above the 200,000 that was expected. And if you've been watching my updates, you know the BLS, they usually have a bad habit. Since they've changed the metrics for calculating this, they've usually been having some pretty strong downward revisions for the previous month or two. But this time we actually had a positive net revisions for the last 2 months. So February was only revised down 5,000. But January was revised up $27,000 for a net of $22,000 in positive revisions for the last 2 months. So really big headline beat. This is definitely one that did not help interest rates. And then in addition to it, we saw hourly earnings rise 0.3%, which is about as expected, and year over year fell from 4.3% to 4.1% wage increase. Again, as expected. And lastly, part of the BLS jobs report, you've got the household survey, which is where the unemployment rate comes from. and that showed 498,000 job gains. Part of that is the labor force did increase 469,000, so unemployment fell from 3.9 to 3.8 because we had slightly more job gains than we did as far as the labor force increase. But an interesting thing to note is within those job gains, of the household survey job gains anyway, there were actually a net of 6,000 full-time job losses. All of the gains were from part-time jobs. And of those, $217,000 were going to multiple part-time job holders. So always a little bit more behind the scenes. As always, hopefully you have a wonderful weekend. If this is helpful, feel free to pass it along to somebody who may benefit. You can have them hit the subscribe button down below to be getting this every single week so they never miss anything. And again, if you have scenarios, you need a second opinion that I can help you with. Always happy to help. So evenings and weekends, give me a call or text and I'll talk to you next time. Take care.