In this weekly market update, Jordan Keck reports that mortgage interest rates have risen to about 6.35%—the highest level this year—driven largely by an oil price spike linked to geopolitical tension in Iran. He provides a detailed guide on securing a rock‑solid pre‑approval, emphasizing the lack of industry standards and outlining specific questions borrowers should ask lenders. Keck highlights his own rigorous pre‑approval process, which verifies 40‑50 data points about the borrower and property within minutes. The oil market discussion covers a surge to $119 per barrel after the Strait of Hormuz closure and the appointment of a hard‑line Iranian leader, followed by a G7‑announced emergency release of 400 million barrels that moderated prices. He then reviews February existing‑home‑sales data, noting a 1.7% month‑over‑month increase to an annualized 4.09 million sales, a 3.8‑month inventory, and the buyer mix (34% first‑time, 31% cash, 16% investors). Inflation metrics are presented: February CPI rose 0.3% MoM (2.4% YoY) with core CPI up 0.2% MoM (2.5% YoY); core PCE for January rose 0.3% MoM (2.8% YoY) and is expected to climb further in March. Keck concludes with actionable advice—lock in rates, re‑evaluate pre‑approvals, and contact him for a more reliable lending experience.
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Good morning and happy Friday. Jordan Keck here, your lender buddy, with your weekly market update. Kicking off, interest rates unfortunately moving higher to the highest levels of the year so far, up from 6.14% to 6.35% week over week. A lot of that due to the situation, almost exclusively due to the situation in Iran with the oil crisis. We'll get in, focus on that pretty heavily today. But before that, I wanted to talk real quick about how to get a rock-solid pre-approval, especially right now with uncertainty in the market. The last thing you want is for your client to have their loan fall through in the 11th hour. So obviously the easiest way to avoid that is to use me as your lender. But if you don't have the luxury of using me as your lender on a particular situation, I want to give you some ideas about what you can ask that lender about to confirm what all is done on their pre-approval. Now, you may or may not know this, but there's no industry-wide accepted standard, oftentimes even company-wide standard, for what constitutes a pre-approval. That means it's really up to the interpretation of the loan officer to decide what they are comfortable with before giving a pre-approval. You unfortunately have likely had the experience of having a pre-approval worth less than the paper that it was written on. So a few things you can ask about are: have you already collected documents? Has it been reviewed by an underwriter? Is their income variable? Have you already run, again, automated underwriting? Is this a situation with many moving pieces? Are you waiting on any documents or waiting for anything to change in their situation to, in order to be approved? Now, these aren't things you need specific personal information details on. These are just asking essentially how many variables are there? How much have you gone through to verify? Are you still waiting on anything? And to give you a little insight, for me, the level of detail that I've got in my systems is honestly pretty unmatched. Even once somebody's pre-approved, if you ask me for a pre-approval letter, between the time that I send it, I'm going to be verifying at least— no joke— at least 40 to 50 different pieces of information about the property itself, about the borrower, about interest rates, the property taxes, homeowner's insurance, flood insurance, the age of the property, the type of the property, the condition of the property. When I send that pre-approval letter, So by the time I send it, if there's anything that I could potentially help limit the chances of going sideways, I'm doing that within a 5 or 10 minute timeframe. And again, this is not even the review process for the client. So when you ask, hey, what's the difference between your preapproval letter and somebody else's? That's the difference there. Next, as far as getting into oil prices here this week, we saw oil spike as high as almost $120 a barrel before moving lower. And this is still changing in real time. So by the time this video comes out, certainly by the end of today, things are going to be different and we're trying to keep up on it the best we can. But they spiked up to $119 a barrel from what was a standard of around $65 a barrel not long ago, mostly due to the Strait of Hormuz being closed. And then the most recent spike here was due to a new leader being named in Iran who's anticipated to be, anticipated to be a hardliner digging in his heels and making the markets think the situation in Iran will not be resolved as quickly as originally hoped. Coming back from that high of $119 a barrel was news from the G7 summit that there's likely going to— they were considering a consolidated emergency oil reserve release, which would drop prices down to about $100 a barrel. And they ended up confirming a 400 million barrel reserve being released. Now it still has continued to bounce around on this. Um, so we'll see where things end up going. There have been more attacks on ships in the Persian Gulf. And the US is saying that they're not ready to be able to escort ships yet, which started another rally, rally on oil here in this week. There was originally some optimism that things could settle down quickly. That looks like it's continuing to wane. We've also got more comments from Trump saying that there's uncertainty around a timeframe in Iran, and uncertainty is the last thing that mortgage rates like. So again, we've moved up here to the highest point for interest rates for the year. No real ETA on when things might go down, so better to be safe, lock your clients in upfront. If they haven't updated their pre-approval or their interest rates in a few weeks or a month, might be worth checking with a lender to see how that affects their pre-approval amount or their payments if they were close to the edge to begin with. Next up, we've got existing home sales numbers for February that rose 1.7%. Pretty big beat over the half a percent decline that was expected. This moved sales to a 4.09 million annualized pace. January was also revised higher, which makes the beat look smaller than it otherwise would have been without that revision. Inventory, existing inventory rose 2.4% to a national 3.8 months of supply. First-time homebuyers accounted for 34% of all sales, cash buyers made up 31%, and investors accounted for 16% of all purchases for the month. Next we have CPI inflation for February, which came in up 3%— excuse me, 0.3% as expected. Year-over-year inflation remained at 2.4%, also as expected, so no real surprises there. The core reading, stripping out food and energy, rose 0.2% for February, and year-over-year core inflation stayed at 2.5%. There was some concern about CPI moving forward, obviously because of oil prices So we won't see those reflected in the core numbers for March, but most likely going to see a bigger number coming in for the headline number because of those energy prices, as we're seeing right now with shipping rates and gasoline rates significantly higher. And similarly here, down for PCE, this is personal consumption expenditure, specifically the core rate, which is the one the Fed looks at the most. But this came out for January, so a little bit old news at this point. Only up 0.3%, which is as expected. Year over year came in at 2.8%, which is below the 2.9%, partly due to rounding on that one. But markets didn't really react again because this is old news and we already expect these numbers are both going to be moving higher here when they come out for March. Core PCE was up 0.4% and then year over year was 3.1%. As always, hopefully this is helpful. Feel free to pass it along to someone you think may benefit. And if you need a second opinion, if you've got any clients who could use a more solid pre-approval, better experience, somebody who can communicate solid and help really understand their options with them, let me know. Happy to help. Available on the weekends. So see you next time. Take care.
