In this weekly market update, Jordan Keck provides a concise overview of current mortgage and housing market conditions. He notes a modest decline in average top‑tier purchase mortgage rates from 7.11% to 7.05% and introduces a "Buy Before You Sell" program that lets borrowers tap up to 70% of existing home equity as an interest‑free loan for a new purchase, down payment, closing costs, or renovations. Keck then reviews the December Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) inflation report, highlighting a 0.3% headline increase and a 0.2% core rise, with year‑over‑year rates at 2.6% and 2.8% respectively. He moves to new‑home sales, reporting a 3.6% month‑over‑month rise to an annualized $698 K pace, a 6.7% year‑over‑year increase, and a median price of $427 K, while emphasizing that only a small fraction of listed new homes are completed. Pending home sales fell 5.5% month‑over‑month, the first decline since July, with the West region hit hardest, possibly due to California wildfires. The FHA delinquency report shows rising 30‑day and 90‑day delinquencies, with unemployment now accounting for 12.1% of delinquencies and debt‑overload for 20.1%. Finally, Case‑Shiller and FHFA price indices for November show modest month‑over‑month gains (0.4% and 0.3%) and year‑over‑year growth converging around 4%. Keck closes with a reminder about the upcoming federal holiday affecting closing timelines.
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Good morning and happy Friday. Jordan Keck here, your lender buddy, with your weekly market update. Kicking off, interest rates down a little bit from last week, seen some nice stability trending in our favor, finally down from 7.11% to 7.05%. As always, a reminder, this is an average for lenders across the country for top-tier purchase scenario rates and still available options with buydowns below that. So just an indicator of where rates are going, not a direct rate quote for any one particular scenario. As far as a mortgage tip this week, want to talk about the Buy Before You Sell program. There's a few different flavors of this out there, and we have a few ourselves, but a great tool as well if you've got somebody who's looking to sell a home, looking to buy another one, wants to use equity from their current home towards a down payment before selling. Not have to do a contingency, and then of course being able to purchase without having to count that payment against them. The Buy Before You Sell program we've got is able to do that. You're able to qualify just on the new purchase payment itself, and you can pull typically up to 70% of the current home equity out as an interest-free loan to go towards your down payment, closing costs, and debt payoffs on the new home, as well as even potentially money to pay off or do some renovations for the current home to prepare it for sale. So if you have questions about that or have any clients that may be benefited by it, let me know. We can also do this if they're selling in one state and looking to buy in another, so I just have to make sure I'm licensed in the state they're buying. We'll be able to get them dialed in. Next up, the PCE, personal consumption expenditures, inflation report for December came in showing an increase on the headline number of 0.3% and core rate up 0.2%, both in line with expectations. So no real surprises on this one. Year-over-year headline rating moved from 2.4 to 2.6, and then the year-over-year core rate stayed at 2.8. So again, fairly standard, no real surprises one way or the other. New home sales, so homes for sales for homes that are not built yet, that rose 3.6% in December to a $698,000 annualized pace. It's about $27,000, $28,000 above estimates. Feel pretty strong. There was an upward revision as well, revision as well, to November. And without that, sales would have been up even higher at 5.1% increase versus the 3.6% that we saw. Sales year over year up 6.7%, with the median new home price coming in nationwide at $427,000. And of the 494,000 new homes that are listed for sale at the end of December, only 118,000 of those homes were actually completed, so less than a quarter, and only 108,000 of those had not even been started. So we're purely conceptual at that point. So it looks like there may be a lot at nearly $500,000 listed, and only 118 of those actually completed and available for sale and inventory in the market right now. Next up, pending home sales, which is contracts on existing homes for December, fell 5.5%. This was the first month-over-month decline that we've seen since July, and sales year over year also down 5%, with month-over-month declines in all 4 regions of the country, with the most significant drop being in the West. West. Not sure how much the fires in LA are going to be affecting that on it. Obviously California is a massive component of that from a population standpoint, making up, I want to say, between around 20% of total mortgages in the country out of the state alone. So obviously whatever happens in California has a huge impact on this total numbers for the West. Next up, FHA's delinquency report for mortgages shows that mortgage rates are up on all all across the spectrum, anywhere from 30-day late payments to 90-day lates and more. 30-day delinquencies rose to 6% in November of '24, up 2.1% from the beginning of 2022. Serious delinquencies for 90 days late or more have also begun to rise. The share of delinquencies due to being unemployed is up to 12.1% of all delinquencies, meaning of anybody who's delinquent on their mortgage, 12.1% of those state that that's because of being unemployed, up from a low of 1.8% in 2022 and 7.7% in Q4 of 2023. So continuing to see that increase as a reason for delinquency. Those who can't pay due to having too much debt has also risen. We saw a low of 2.71% for that being the reason in Q2 of 2022 to now 20.1% of all delinquencies using that as is saying that that's a reason they can't pay is too much debt as of Q2 2024. Lastly here, Case-Shiller and FHFA home price appreciation data came in for the month of November showing growth of home prices up 0.4% and 0.3% respectively. Case-Shiller's up 3.8% year over year with an increase from 3.6% in the October report, so seeing an increase year over year there. FHFA up 4.2% year over year which was below the last report of 4.5. So Case-Shiller, a little bit of an increase year over year. FHFA, a little bit of a decrease. So their numbers coming closer to each other in the middle there of around 4% growth in home prices year over year. As always, hopefully this is helpful. Remember that next month, I want to say it's the 17th, is a federal holiday. So be sure of that in your closing timeframes to plan accordingly. Have a great weekend and we'll see you next time in February. Take care.
