#mortgage-rates

#mortgage-rates

Barratt Redrow's management indicated that while current trading remains resilient, the visibility beyond the current financial year is more uncertain due to external economic factors.

Cash-out refinance volume rose 9% from February and 21% from March 2025, while rate-and-term refinance volume fell 34% month over month but remained more than 66% higher than a year ago.

"Today's increase is significant, but it doesn't mean the labor market is back on track or growing robustly. The gains are highly concentrated in a few industries, not broad-based across the economy."

The February PAPI declined over the month and is nearly 10% lower than a year ago, reflecting both reduced payments and steady income growth, Edward Seiler said. While affordability conditions remain challenging in many markets, these incremental gains felt across more than half of states are an encouraging sign for prospective buyers, particularly those seeking lower-payment options.

Before the Iran war began, a rate cut at the Bank's next meeting on 19 March had been an 80% chance, but policymakers are now expected to wait to see how the conflict develops with a 99% probability of a hold at the meeting and no rate cuts for the rest of 2026, markets indicate.

The average 30-year fixed mortgage rate is around 5.98% to 5.99% this week, Freddie Mac said Thursday. The percentage is down sharply from 6.8% to 6.9% a year ago and from peaks near 8% in late 2023, per The Wall Street Journal. On a typical loan, that rate drop can cut monthly payments by hundreds of dollars for home buyers.

The COVID fog shows up when decision-makers treat the 2.65% mortgage trough from January 2021 as a normal frame of reference rather than what it was, an extreme, unsustainable outlier created by a crisis policy response. Mortgage rates rose more than five percentage points from that trough, reaching 7.79% in October 2023 and easing to about 6.2% by September 2024.

NAA-NMHC research shows we need to build 4.3 million more apartments by 2035 to meet demand. To date, the Trump Administration has implemented a number of pro-housing, common-sense policies from easing burdensome regulations to eliminating barriers that slow development which are important steps in the right direction. Yet now more than ever is the time for decisive and transformational action.

Mortgage rates are near 6%, which means it costs builders less to do a buy-down, and because they sell homes as a commodity, they're trying their best to manage this cycle and their profit margins. This means selling a new home in recent years has been more of a calculation on how much builder credit they can and need to give.

With mortgage rates near 6%, weekly housing demand rebounded as winter weather effects began fading from the data. The improvement appears tied more to normalization following the late-January snowstorm than to a structural acceleration in market activity. New listings also increased week over week, reinforcing signs that weather-related distortions are easing. Housing inventory rose modestly, and the year-over-year price-cut percentage is now nearly 1% lower than during the same period in 2025.

While homebuilder sentiment remains subdued after a 12-month grind that hasn't quite let up, Robert Dietz, Chief Economist for the National Association of Home Builders, offered guarded optimism in his take on housing economics' complex set of market drivers. In other words, the worst of the worst may be over, but don't expect a switch to flip. Not yet, anyway.