Rates, Land Loans, Fed Chair, Foreclosures, Wage Growth, Realtor Confidence, and PCE Inflation

Good morning and happy Friday. Jordan Keck here, your lender buddy, with your weekly market update. Kicking off, interest rates did see a bit of a jump this week from 6.07% to 6.19%. Still watching to see if they continue to stay low, if they're going to be moving higher. A lot of the drop we've seen over the last 2 weeks was a result of President Trump announcing that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would be directed to purchase $200 billion in bonds, mortgage bonds, and securities. Now, we haven't seen a rollout of exactly what kind of a buying schedule that's going to be yet. But if and when we do, that could inspire some further improvement in the market. But in the meantime, so far, been losing some of those gains that we've seen early on. As far as the weekly mortgage tip here, wanting to talk about new products I've been rolling out. This week able to start doing land loans up to 80% loan to value. These will be 10-year fixed rate loan products here, going to be underwritten very similar using debt-to-income ratios here. And so if you're in a situation where you've got a client who's looking to buy land, not looking to build on it right away, maybe just holding it for recreation purposes, hunting, whatever it may be, as long as it's not large acreage, can still help you out with this for loan amounts anywhere from $50,000 up to $500,000. So great product here. It does have to be zoned for residential, uh, one-unit residential use there. So can't do commercial on that. Can't do large agricultural or farming land here, but great product here. Super slick and easy to do, pretty reasonable rates. And again, 10-year fixed rate loan. So if you have any opportunities I can help you with, let me know. And that's in addition to the full construction loan programs that we can do. And then also home equity lines of credit, adding in quite a few products here. So if you think that there might be an option out there for lending, let me know. Chances are I've got it for you. Next up here, the Fed chair replacement will be announced soon. Trump said it'll be within the next week or two here, and likely testing the waters here. We've seen, well, Kevin Walsh is still the front runner in the market expectations. He's projected to be about 45% likely there. That has come down 14% since the beginning of the week. And a lot of that was when Trump made pretty positive comments about BlackRock executive Rick Rieder, potentially testing the market to see how they'd react to him being a new Fed candidate. He was— he's now projected about 33% chance in second place, which has doubled in the last week after those Trump comments. Next up, Attom Data announced that foreclosures and this is an article that got picked up by HousingWire. If you've seen this headline that US foreclosure filings rise 14% in 2025 as FHA borrowers face greater risk. While that is true, it's very, very misleading. And the reason is because we had such low levels of foreclosures, it's not really hard to go up 14%. Foreclosures in 2024 were just 0.23% of all properties. And in 2025, it was 0.26%. 6. But because the only times it's been lower than that in history were 2020 and 2021, when there was a moratorium of foreclosures in place. So this is really coming off of the artificially low numbers, still historically extremely low, just a clickbait headline here. So if any of your clients are bringing this up or have concerns in the market, easy to dispel those and just let them know, hey, we're still far below any levels where they would be concerned here. The, for reference, in 2009 and 2010, the actual number of foreclosures then was 10 times where we're currently at. Next, the Atlanta Fed wage tracker showed wage increases slowing, so they're not going negative year over year, but we did see them go from 4% increase to 3.7% in December. Job stayers went from a 3.7% year over year increase to 3.5%. Also continuing to move a little bit lower. And job changers went from 4.5% to 4.0% increase year over year in wages. And this could be helpful because we've seen wage pressure inflation contribute quite a bit to the overall numbers. And the lower we get for inflation, the more we're likely going to see some improvement in those mortgage rates. We've also been seeing this point to continued weakness in the labor market as fewer companies are poaching employees to change. And offering higher amounts of pay incentive for those changes. Next, NAR announced their December Realtor Confidence Index showing improvements over 2025. Overall, the metrics were strong with 16% of all homes selling above list price and cancellations unchanged at 5%. After we saw a lot of headlines in 2025 about the increasing number of cancellations, now 2026 unchanged year over year to 2025. And there were 2.2 offers per home on average, with really the only negative data point in the report being days on market, which increased from 35 to 39 year over year. And lastly here, PCE, the personal consumption expenditure inflation report, was finally released for October and November after delays from the government shutdown, showing headline inflation at 0.21% and 0.16% respectively. Both very low reasonable numbers here, which are great to see for year over year inflation, been averaging at around 2.4% if annualized out. The current year-over-year headline and core readings are both unchanged at 2.8% compared to September. January and February of 2025, though, were both very high inflation number readings. So if we continue to see these low monthly amounts, might be able to see the year-over-year numbers drop significantly as January and February's inflation numbers come out, replacing the previous higher numbers. As always, hopefully this is helpful for you. Have a fantastic weekend. Let me know if there's anything I can do to help for you or your clients, and I'll see you next time. Take care.