Mortgage rates dipped to 6.83% this week. A LendingTree survey found 41% of buy-now-pay-later users are late on payments. Rent growth slowed to 0.5% month-over-month despite a record 7% vacancy rate, while job openings fell to 7.19 million, the lowest in years.
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Good morning and happy Friday. Jordan Keck here, your lender buddy, with your weekly market update. Happy May already, kicking off interest rates a little bit lower from last week. 6.92% last week for the average, down to 6.83%. Looking at where some of the job reports coming in today though in the market might see that tick up a little bit higher by the end of the day. So probably ending up flat after grinding out a little bit of improvement back to where we were. So not much change overall. As far as our weekly mortgage tip, want to talk about appraisal transfers from one buyer to another. So this is most common on FHA and VA appraisals. When an appraisal is done, buyer backs out for some reason, can't fulfill, that appraisal actually stays with the property. Rather than that specific buyer. So if you have that appraisal already on a property, anytime somebody is looking to do an FHA loan or a VA loan, they have a case number that's assigned to them for that specific property address, and they'd get alerted if there's been an appraisal already done. That would have to be transferred from the other lender, transfer that case number assignment over, and then be used by the new buyer. Now on conventional, it's a little bit trickier. Conventional doesn't stay with the property, and so we've had a couple of times where I've had a buyer, or let's say somebody refinance, appraisal comes in low, appraiser didn't really do a great job, we can order a new conventional appraisal, get a different value, and be able to use that to close. Transferring one conventional appraisal to a different buyer though for the same property, virtually impossible. There's a lot of factors involved with it, but essentially safe to say that unless it's a broker like myself who orders an appraisal with one lender, and then I switch to a different lender, and then I can go ahead and transfer it and use it. That's still fine. But transferring from one loan officer in one company to a different loan officer at a different company, theoretically possible, virtually, you know, practically not really. So just know, if you already have an appraisal done, and let's say it's a listing of yours, If it's FHA or VA, easy to transfer. If it's conventional, probably not going to work. Next, LendingTree did a survey for about 2,000 people showing a large amount of delinquencies on buy now, sell, or buy now, pay later programs. Out of the survey, 41% responded that they have been late on the program for payments within the last 12 months. A third of them said that they use buy now, pay later programs to bridge the gap between paychecks. 25% said they use it for groceries. 48% of all respondents say they regretted using it, and 50% are planning on using it again within the next 6 months. This showing continued strain on the consumer spending markets here. We've seen a lot of savings deplete after COVID, seen consumer spending up, credit card debts higher, and starting to get into those higher delinquencies. So something to continually watch as there are more concerns of recession. And economic worries going on. Next up, Cotality, or CoreLogic, they kind of rebrand, reported rents were up 2.9% in February year over year compared to 2024. This is much lower than the 4.1% that's reported in the Consumer Price Index and the PCE, the personal consumption expenditures inflation reports. But as we've seen for years, the data in these reports is pretty delayed when it comes to rental rates. So hopefully the real-time data that we're getting will continually lead to lower inflation data in the future, but it could be quite a bit delayed, so tough to say exactly how long that's going to be. In addition to that, apartment lists reported rents were up 0.5% in April, but still down 0.3% year over year. This is typically when we see rental prices rise, but due to a rise in vacancy rates, and we're seeing vacancy rose from 6.9% to 7%, which is the highest on record since they began tracking in 2017. That is putting a lot of pressure on landlords to lower rates and be more competitive to try and make sure they fill those vacancies. Next, the JOLTS jobs opening report for the month of March showed 7.19 million job openings, which did come in below estimates of 7.48 million. Last month was also revised lower from 7.57 to 7.48. Adding to the weakness for this report, hiring rate remained at 3.4%, close to the lowest level since 2014 when removing COVID, showing that there's not as many openings. You know, hiring's not changing. So then looking at a lot of these potential precursors for economic data and keeping a close eye on those. Case-Shiller and FHFA reported home price appreciation up 0.3% and 0.1% for the month of February, respectively. Case-Shiller is now up 3.9% year over year, slightly below the 4.1% that we saw in the previous report. No huge changes. And FHFA is up 3.9% year over year. This was a big drop from the previous month reporting a 5.0 number, but a lot of that had to do with the month of February, which previously in 2024 saw a 1.2% increase for the month alone, and replacing that with this month, which is just a 0.1% reading. On a trailing 12-month average, a rolling 12-month average. So because of that, that big change down from 5% to 3.9%, but still moving forward, just not as fast as we were. And lastly here, the PCE, personal consumption expenditure data for inflation for the month of March came out, came in higher than expected, was expected to come in at 0.5%, ended up coming in up 0.7% for the month. Definitely not what we were needing. And so that data, in addition to a stronger than normal jobs report this morning, is what has been pushing mortgage rates higher. February was also revised higher on PCE by 0.1%. The headline number decreased from 2.7% to 2.3% year over year. Now, even though that was a decrease, the markets expected it to decrease even more to 2.2%. So remember, when we get good inflation numbers, even though this did come in lower on a year over year basis, we still saw markets react negatively because the expectation was that it would improve even more. It's not the actual numbers the markets react to, it's the change in expectations. And lastly here, the core rate was flat for the month and year over year fell from 3% to 2.6%, pretty much right as expected. They were expecting it to be a little bit lower, but again, markets not loving this data. Not a huge miss, but enough that we're not really going to see a huge reprieve on interest rates as a result. As always, hopefully this is helpful. Have a fantastic weekend. Big reminder as well, still doing residential and commercial lending. So if you have needs on either side, let me know. Still making sure both get the attention that they need. We've got an incredible team on both sides. So if there's anything I can help with, or especially investors, we're potentially looking at 1 to 4 family conventional, maybe DSCR loans, mixed use, outright commercial use. Let me know. Happy to help and get them taken care of. You can have a wonderful weekend. We'll see you next time. Take care. Mm-hmm.
