Market Update - Rates, Jobless Claims, Home Appreciation, Pending Home Sales, and Q3 GDP

Good morning, happy Friday, happy New Year. Jordan Keck here, your lender buddy, with your weekly market update. Quick reminder that MLK Day is the 19th, which is a Monday, so that's a federal holiday, no closings that day. But other than that, business as usual, back to it here this new year. Hope you had a Great Christmas and New Year. Starting off, interest rates unchanged week over week at 6.2%. Our weekly mortgage tip, wanting to talk about manufactured home requirements. So you most likely already know that manufactured homes that are in a park, not on their own land, are considered chattel or personal property. So there are loans for those, but they are not the traditional real estate loans, so they won't qualify for conventional, FHA, VA, USDA loans. But if a manufactured home is on its own land, it may qualify under certain conditions. The first one, the age requirement, is it has to be newer than June 15th, 1976. That's the manufacturer date. So if it's manufactured June 16th, it's fine. If it was manufactured June 14th, 1976, will not pass for traditional financing. Can get alternative types, yes, but at higher interest rates and higher down payment amounts. Not nearly as nice. Another thing you want to keep in mind, most of the time, not always, but it's going to usually require a foundation certification by an engineer. This is default on FHA. It's actually a built-in requirement on conventional and VA. It's discretionary by the appraiser and the underwriter. Most of the time they will require it if there's any attached decks or awnings that might put additional weight on the foundation. In addition to that, you always want to watch for the data plates and the HUD certification labels. The labels will typically be a small metal red disc or a kind of square rectangle on the outside of each portion of the home. And the data plate's usually kept on the inside of a cupboard or a closet door. If you don't have either of those on the home, there can be a report that's ordered, but great to have that ahead of time if you, um, are already listing the home, or let's say you're looking at it during the inspection, wanna take some pictures of those so you might be able to save some money on the lending reports. Next up, initial jobless claims fell 16,000 and continuing claims fell 47,000, mostly due to the holiday. This was a holiday week and they don't really do a great job of reporting around that. We'll probably see the same thing on the next report that comes out for this week because we had two weeks with holidays in the middle of them. And so probably going to skew that data a little lower after next week's data comes out. Then the week following, we'll probably see a spike higher in continuing claims. maybe even in first-time claims as well, which we usually do. First-time claims are now at 199,000 for the week, continuing claims at 1.886 million. Next, we got Case-Shiller and FHFA home appreciation data for the month of October, both showing home values up 0.4% for the month. This is above estimates on both reports. Case-Shiller is now up 1.4% year over year, which is an acceleration from the 1.3% previously. And this is the first time we've seen an acceleration in the year-over-year, uh, pace since January. So almost a full year. FHFA is up 1.7% year-over-year, slightly lower than the 1.8% previous, but only because that was an upward revised number. Next, pending home sales for November rose 3.3%, stronger than the 1% that was expected. This measures signed contracts on existing homes. And adding even more strength to this report was a higher revision for October, which brought it up from 1.9% to 2.4%, which was the biggest gains of that coming in from the West. If we didn't see that, we would have seen an even stronger number this month than 3.3% because it's comparing to a stronger month previous. Year-over-year pending home sales are up 2.6%, which is a big improvement from the October reading we saw, which was down 4%. And lastly here, GDP for Q3 came in stronger than expected at a 4.3% annualized pace versus the 3.3% that was expected. Now there are normally 3 readings of the GDP for each quarter. You've got the advance, the preliminary, and the final. Due to the government shutdown, we didn't get an advance to read, so this went straight to the preliminary. So there is still another reading of this that could change it some and be revised. Expectation for this again was supposed to be 3.3%, and it's a big increase from the 3.8% we saw for GDP in Q2. Remember, those numbers are the annualized pace, not the actual pace for that quarter. When you take each quarter into account right now, if this number stayed at the final 4.3% for the quarter annualized, the true GDP for the year would be at 2.5%, which is pretty strong. And a big portion of that likely reflects a rush to purchase electric vehicles before the tax credit expired here in Q3. As always, hopefully this is always helpful for you. Let me know if you have any questions, anything that I can help with, residential or commercial, and look forward to seeing you next time. Take care.