In this weekly market update, Jordan Keck provides a concise briefing for borrowers and real‑estate professionals. He begins with a reminder of the upcoming Christmas and New Year holidays and how reduced business hours may affect loan processing. He then reports that mortgage rates have slipped slightly, with conventional rates now in the mid‑low 6% range and FHA/VA/USDA rates in the low‑6% to high‑5% range. Keck offers a practical mortgage tip on flood‑zone determination, explaining how to use the FEMA Flood Map Search, the distinction between flood zones that require insurance, and how to challenge insurance requirements when only land is affected. He outlines the 2025 loan‑limit changes: conventional single‑family limit rises to $806,500, FHA base limit to $524,225 (with regional adjustments), and a new 4‑unit owner‑occupied limit of $1.51 million with a 5% down payment. The segment then shifts to labor‑market data, summarizing the BLS November jobs report (227k jobs added, unemployment up to 4.2%), the ADP report (146k jobs, largely from large firms), and the Challenger job‑cut report (27% increase YoY). Keck cites Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s recent remarks that the Fed will be cautious about rate cuts, noting market expectations of a modest 25‑bp cut in December and fewer cuts in 2025. He connects the weaker job data to a modest improvement in mortgage rates, emphasizing that rates tend to react to negative economic news. The update concludes with a call to share the information and a friendly sign‑off.
Chapters
Good morning and happy Friday. Jordan Keck, your lender buddy, back here after a break last week with your weekly market update. Hope everybody had a fantastic Thanksgiving. Good to be back here for you. And just a reminder, coming up this month, a couple more holidays. We've got Christmas Day, and then New Year's Day, January 1st, both on Wednesdays this month. Those are both going to be holidays. Beyond that, even though those are technically the only two federal holidays, the day before, probably going to be an early close for a lot of companies, maybe subtitle companies, recording offices, and then days after that, pretty much plan on if it's not closed by Monday, maybe Tuesday morning the week of Christmas, probably not going to be happening. Maybe get something done Friday the 27th. But just plan on it being slow. A lot of people are going to be gone on vacation or reduced hours, so just make sure you're planning accordingly for that. And then New Year's Eve, the 31st Tuesday, still a full business day on that one, and it's really just that following Wednesday, the day after, that is another federal holiday. So again, plan accordingly on that. And then getting back into the new year, a lot of forward-looking on that. As far as interest rates go this week, down slightly, so Last time, a couple weeks ago, we were still above 7, and last week dropped to 6.88, and this week to 6.84. So seen some good improvement there, getting a decent amount of clients in, in the mid to low 6s range now for conventional. And then FHA, VA, USDA, seeing those in the low 6s to high 5s right now. So good to see some movement there. As far as our mortgage tip this week, wanted to talk about flood zones, and this is something that can often be a surprise to a buyer or to a seller. Specifically, if a seller doesn't have a loan on the property, or they maybe have a private loan, they might not be required to have flood insurance. That doesn't mean that a new buyer financing it may not be— may not have to get flood insurance on it. So a quick and easy way to do this is with the FEMA flood map search. I have a link into my email here, or you can just Google FEMA flood Flood Map Search. You can type in the way— address of whatever property you want, and it will show you an overlay of the flood zones. Typically, anything in a flood zone A, E, anything other than an X, which is out of it, anything inside of a 100-year flood zone would be required to have flood insurance on it. And a little nuance piece here: when you look at the overlay, if it's covering a portion of the property but not the structure itself, even though sometimes it might come up with a flood determination saying you need flood insurance, I can use that and argue that it's just covering the land, not the house itself. And I've always been able to overturn that, so you don't need to provide flood insurance on that. If it is— the structure itself is in a flood zone, but there might have been what's called a letter of map amendment that individually requested removal from the flood zone, possibly because of an elevation certificate, those wouldn't show up automatically in that. That's something you'd have to do some more digging to find. So if you have any questions around these, let me know. I've gone through these rabbit holes quite a bit, very familiar, and can help guide you through your particular scenario. But in the meantime, that search tool is a great way to just quick determination for a buyer or seller. Is this property likely to have any issues with a flood zone and need any flood insurance? Next up, mortgage loan limits. You probably already heard this from every single lender. Who you're on a mailing list for or see on Facebook. Loan limits have increased. Probably not new information, but just making sure that you have it. So for 2025, the official determination for conventional single-family loans is $806,500, and the FHA base limit is $524,225. Now note that those do change for FHA depending on the area, and both of those change depending on the number of units. So for FHA, for example, base limit is up $26,000. If you're in Corvallis area, that loan amount actually didn't change, still at $598,000. Portland is up $16,000 to $698,750 for the base loan amounts for single-family. Conventional up about $40,000, but also remember that conventional now is allowing 5% down on multifamily up to 4 units when it's owner-occupied. So with that, the conventional loan limit for a 4-unit property is $1.51 million. So you can do owner-occupied, 5% down payment, even as a first-time home buyer, up to a $1.5 million loan amount on a fourplex. So some pretty cool stuff there. Next up, jobs week here. Got information from the BLS, from ADP, jobless claims, Challenger job cuts. So kicking off with the BLS jobs report, November showed about 227,000 jobs created versus a 214 estimate. A little bit of a beat wasn't taken too seriously, though. A lot of those were bounce-back jobs from people coming back after the strikes or after the storms. We even saw about 56,000 in positive revisions to October and September's numbers, with 32,000 for September, 24,000 for October. But the biggest reason that wasn't taken too seriously, besides the fact that they're the bounce-back jobs is because the household survey component of the job report, which is where unemployment comes from, that showed 355,000 job losses for that same month of November. Because of that, we also had unemployed increased by 161,000, labor force shrunk by 193,000, resulting in unemployment rate rising to 4.246%, rounded down to 4.2%. Next up, the ADP jobs report showed 146,000 jobs created, below the 160,000 that was expected. And October was also revised lower by 49,000 to 184,000. Report would have been even weaker if not for the seasonal adjustments, though. If you look at just the raw number, there was only 63,000 jobs created for the month, which was revised up to the 146,000 because of seasonality. Almost all of that hiring was by large businesses. Likely ramping up for the holiday seasons, with small businesses shedding a net of 17,000 jobs for the month. Next up, the Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell spoke this week and said he's hesitant to continue cutting interest rates, especially at the pace that the market had been pricing in. He said he believes the US economy is in good shape and there's no reason to believe that will not continue, so they plan to be more cautious about lowering rates until the data suggests that they need to speed that up. So right now, the market for Fed futures is currently pricing in a 25 basis point cut on their next meeting, December 18th, and then pricing in about 3 quarters of cuts of price drops from the Fed here in 2025, which is lower than the previous estimate of 100 basis points or 1% lower. Initial jobless claims rose 9,000 to 224,000. First-time claims for the week, with continuing claims, claims falling by 25,000, now to be at 1.871 million. This is likely a little bit skewed though because of the holiday last week. They don't do a great job of adjusting for that seasonally, especially because Thanksgiving can be on different days for different years. So take those with a grain of salt as usual. And lastly here, the Challenger Jobs Cut Report for the month of November showed that job cuts are up 27% from the same time last year. Pretty big increase. And on the hiring side, employers announced 762,000 hiring plans year to date, which is down 2% from the same period last year and the lowest amount in almost 10 years. So Jerome Powell talking about the economy staying pretty strong, starting to see some weakness there in those jobs numbers this week. So ultimately, again, we'll continue to see what happens. Mortgage rates, though, typically respond really well to bad news. So even though Jerome Powell saying that he wasn't going to be cutting as quickly as expected, market seems to be taking a little bit more hint from those job numbers and seeing that improvement in rates. So hopefully this is helpful. As always, if you know anyone who wants to get this information like this, feel free to pass it along. They can subscribe down with the link below. I'm happy to add them as well. Hope you have a wonderful weekend. We'll see you next time. Take care.
