Mortgage Rate Intelligence & Market Updates

Move comes as Rocket’s servicing book tops $2 trillion and 9.1 million loans

I like to say that I am one good Lottery Scratcher away from ditching this daily Commentary gig and starting something new. All kidding aside, where should we start today? With the rumored FICO layoffs yesterday afternoon? Iowa, Michigan, and the Carolinas all having conferences now? Pennymac is now live with VantageScore 4.0 across all three production channels. If you want to learn about appraisal news, there’s a 7AM PT (you’re your read that right) Fannie webinar tomorrow morning: Fannie Mae’s UAD 3.6 Policy Exception: What You Need to Know! Two Harbors and UWM are firing shots at each other. In terms of interest rates, oil price inflation from the war, the U.S. budget deficit, competition for investor money from AI companies issuing debt, and tariff price inflation aren’t going away any time soon, so there is little reason for rates to drop. Lenders and vendors are wondering if they want to go through another business cycle, and on today’s Advisory Angle at 11AM PT, STRATMOR’s Amanda Gibson and Garth Graham discuss what mortgage lending leaders should be thinking about now, before a leadership transition becomes urgent. Tech of varying shapes and sizes is the focus of Mortgage Matters tomorrow at 11AM PT (presented by Lenders One and featuring Blue Sages’s Ash Omar) and The AI Show at noon PT (presented by JazzX AI and featuring JazzX AI’s Kunal Patel). (Today’s podcast can be found here. This week’s ‘casts are presented by Floify, the mortgage industry’s leading point-of-sale platform. Dynamic Apps, which can be seen at booth 600 during MBA Annual next week, lets lenders create fully customizable loan applications for any loan type, including HELOCs, construction, agricultural lending, non-QM and more, without custom development. Today’s has an interview with Polly’s Adam Carmel on where capital markets tech is heading: AI-native foundation, unified operating system, and the first firm built to run on it. Introducing PollyOS/Hedge.)

If rate movement were a car, it’s been driving pretty recklessly recently, and definitely not keeping good pace with other motorists. But every now and then, we see a break in the craziness. The overnight trading session provided an example. The bond car set its adaptive cruise control to follow the car in front of it (oil prices, in today’s case). That’s left us just a bit stronger to start, but it’s not an inspiring reversal so much as a coincidental mini-correction.  10yr yields unfortunately seem to be hitting resistance at 5.26%, but oil bounced at the same time, and we’re not really in love with technicals these days. This afternoon’s 3yr Treasury auction has a small chance of being mildly interesting (emphasis on small/mild). 

There has been a lot of interest in how tariffs affect consumer prices (for example, Cavallo et al. 2021, 2025). In this post, we present results from our new research paper that estimates the effects of the 2025-26 tariffs on retail consumer prices. We find that for every percentage point increase in average tariffs, consumer goods prices increase by about a quarter of a percent after one year. Roughly two-thirds of the effect arises because tariffs raise the prices of imported consumer goods. The remaining third arises indirectly: tariffs increase the prices of goods made in the U.S. because producers pay more for imported parts and materials, and because producers raise their markups when competing imports cost more. The effects differ in their timing. Prices of imported goods respond quickly to tariffs, while prices of U.S.-made goods adjust over six to twelve months as higher costs move through the supply chain.

The MLS asks a New York federal judge to declare its policies procompetitive and antitrust compliant

The Federal Home Loan Banks’ Mortgage Partnership Finance® Program helps community lenders expand homeownership through liquidity, collaboration and targeted financing solutions

The new appraisal standard is more than a form update: Five actions can help lenders protect pipeline continuity and capture the benefits of better-structured collateral data

The Fed lifted the target range by 25 bps to 3.75%–4%, but mortgage rates track long-term yields, not the Fed funds rate

A majority of shareholders backed the removal of five directors, including interim CEO Daniel Lewis, with Better finalizing his successor