In this weekly market briefing, lender Jordan Keck reports a modest decline in mortgage rates from 6.17% to 6.04% driven by recent economic data. He introduces a new high‑end custom construction loan product that can finance up to $3.5 million with loan‑to‑value ratios as high as 85%, addressing the limitation of conventional loan caps for luxury builds. Keck then reviews a series of macro indicators: ADP’s weak weekly job creation (average 6,500 jobs/week, revised down), a contentious BLS January jobs report showing a 130,000‑job gain despite massive raw job losses, a sharper‑than‑expected 8.4% drop in existing home sales, a slight decline in inventory, rising initial and continuing unemployment claims, flat December retail sales with a modest core decline, and CPI data indicating headline inflation at 0.2% month‑over‑month and 2.4% year‑over‑year, moving closer to the Fed’s 2% target. He concludes with a reminder of the President’s Day holiday and offers continued availability for clients. The overall tone is conversational yet data‑driven, with cautious optimism about lower rates and critical skepticism toward the BLS revisions.
Chapters
Good morning and happy Friday the 13th. Jordan Keck here, your lender buddy, with your weekly market update. Starting off, no bad luck today for interest rates. We're dropping from 6.17% to 6.04% week over week on the heels of some good economic data for jobs and for the bond market inflation here. Heading in the right direction for mortgage rates. Starting off though, I want to talk about our weekly mortgage tip here. We have a new product for high-end luxury construction. So historically, if you're wanting to do owner-occupied construction loans, you're maxed out at the conventional loan limit of around $830,000 and change. This means that if you wanted to build a $2 million home, you'd need to come up with about $1.2 million for down payment in order to get that financed. Very little additional construction lending out there. So we now have two lenders offering custom construction loans up to $3.5 million at some pretty high loan-to-values. So, and depending on the price range, can go up to 85% loan-to-value at the higher end of it, looking maybe maxing out about 75%, which is still significantly better than a lot of the other programs we've seen. So if you have any clients or any builders who have custom construction financing needs above that standard $830,000 limit, let me know. Can now do financing above and below that limit. As far as this week's employment data, ADP's weekly employment report showed an average of just 6,500 jobs created per week for the 4 weeks ending January 24th, which is a very weak number. And on its line with the previous monthly report as well, the previous reading was also revised lower from 7,750 jobs per week to 5,000 jobs per week, adding further weakness. And this is one of the things that helped the mortgage rates get lower this week. The BLS jobs report here, this is a really interesting one, showed 130,000 jobs created in January. The market is not believing it. The reason for this is because we saw virtually flat job growth for the BLS in all of 2025 after the revisions were done on it. I think there was about 180,000 jobs created for the entire year when they had the revisions. And so the market looking at 130,000 jobs created just for the month of January. Are calling foul on the revisions. Part of this reason as well is that the raw data saw 2.65 million job losses for the month of January from the business survey, and the household survey saw 630,000 job losses. But because of seasonal adjustments, they reported that as a 130,000 job gain for the month. Normally, this would be really bad for the bond market, for mortgage rates, but because the market's not taking it seriously anymore, they ended up responding more positively, likely looking at the raw data of the 2.65 million job losses. Next, we have existing home sales for January were down 8.4%, which is double the 4% drop that was expected. The annualized pace of that is now at 3.91 million, potentially due to weather having a big impact. We saw a really large cold front, especially throughout the Northeast, We also saw existing inventory fell 0.8% to 1.22 million units nationally, which is up 3.4% year over year and currently at a 3.7-month supply of inventory. Saw initial jobless claims rose for the week 5,000 to 227,000, and continuing claims rose 21,000 to 1.86 million. Continuing claims number was above market estimates here. It's still below 1.9 million, which is a very elevated number. But if we've been seeing a good portion of these benefits might just be expiring rather than seeing these employees going back and returning to work, judging by the weaker employment numbers, probably more the case of those benefits expiring. Next, retail sales for December were expected to be up 0.4%, but came in flat with no change. The core index fell 0.1%, which is half a percent below market expectations. November was also revised lower by 0.2%, making the report even weaker. And again, this is one of those things that helped mortgage rates for the week. And lastly here, to cap it all off, we saw CPI inflation for January come in today down— up only 0.17% below estimates. They ended up rounding it to 0.2% for the headline reading. Year over year fell from 2.7% to 2.4%, getting very close to that 2% number the Fed's looking for. Giving mortgage rates another reason here, capping off the week, to continue to stay low. And lastly here, the core reading for CPI came in up only 0.3%, which was in line with estimates and would have been 0.2% if not for a 6.5% rise this month in airline fares. Year over year, the core CPI inflation number dropped from 2.6% to 2.5%. And lastly here, remember that Monday is a holiday with President's Day. No closings, no CDs, or right of rescission period counted there. I will still be available if you need anything. Give me a call. Happy to help you and your clients and have a wonderful weekend. We'll see you next time.
