03 June 2025

Mortgage Rate Updates

First let’s start with some good news after a pretty rough few weeks in the markets. Mortgage rates moved slightly lower last week according to Mortgage News Daily:

Relevant Economic Report Updates

The short week and relatively light economic calendar kept mortgage rates relatively stable last week. Several housing-related reports painted a mixed picture for the housing market.  Some good news: Purchase applications improved modestly. Here is a great graphic showing overall we are UP on purchase applications compared to this same time last year. This is good news, we need to count our wins where we can!

Pending home sales made for some dicey headlines, but the reality looks more like kicking the same old can along the bottom of the same old range. No big changes here.

Lastly on the housing data front, Case Shiller and FHFA released March home price data.  Here too, the charts are mostly drifting sideways near recent lows.  This is actually good news because as long as the lines are over zero, home prices continue moving higher.

The catch is that the seasonally adjusted Case Shiller data showed the first monthly decline since early 2023–something that bears watching in the coming months.

We saw some rate benefit on Thursday thanks to tepid economic data, and Friday’s inflation data didn’t add much to the bigger picture as markets are generally waiting to see the extent to which tariffs actually impact the official inflation reports – something that arguably takes months. So between Fed messaging and bond market trading, it seems as though we might be in “wait and see” mode for the time being. Based on these charts and conditions, I wouldn’t expect to see any significant rate drops in the near future.

What I’ve got my eye on this week:

On a more timely note, the market is always willing to react to bona fide shifts in the economy–especially when it concerns big ticket reports like Purchasing Managers Indexes (PMIs) or the all-important jobs report.  The coming week brings both of the main PMIs (Mon, Wed) as well as the jobs report on Friday.  As is typically the case for the first week of the month, there are several other relevant supporting actors on any given day.

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