Mortgage rates tick lower & declining new home listings

00:00 Brad

Mortgage rates for the week ending June 26th are out. Yahoo Finance’s Claire Boston joins me now with the numbers, Claire. What do we know?

00:07 Claire Boston

Hi, Brad. This week, the 30-year mortgage rate is at 6.77%, that is down slightly from 6.81% a week ago. 15-year mortgage rates are now at 5.89%, down from 5.96% last week. So, we are inching down. We have been inching down for several weeks now. This is actually the lowest we have been since early May. That being said, 6.77% still rounds to 6.8. We have been in this high 6% space for a very, very long time. And I’m not sure that this moves the needle for affordability, you know, anything more than that 6.8 that we’ve been seeing recently.

00:54 Brad

We’ve got a comment here from Sam Cater, who is the Freddie Mac Chief Economist, “Borrowers should find comfort in the stability of mortgage rates, which have only fluctuated within a narrow 15 basis point range since mid-April.” It goes on to say, “Although recent data shows that that home sales remain low, the resulting available inventory provides home buyers with a wider range of options to consider when entering the market.” Claire, we also know that there’s a new report out showing the new home listings are falling in 20 of the 50 most populous US metro areas. Walk us through some of the data that you’re seeing here.

01:48 Claire Boston

Yes, we’ve been talking about inventory a lot recently, um, and for this spring, we saw a lot more listings. But there are signs now, we are in late June, that that inventory may have peaked. Redfin just had a report that found that the listings were falling in 20 of the 50 metro areas. The biggest declines were in Florida. So Tampa is down 15%, Orlando, 11, San Antonio, 14%. These are all places that we saw really big spikes in inventory because people were listing their homes and there’s a lot of new homes for sale there too. It seems like maybe if you were that seller, you didn’t get an offer this spring, maybe you pulled the listing now, you can try again in the fall, you know, when people start looking again and it’s a little bit less hot.

02:47 Brad

Claire, thanks so much. We’re going to continue to track what this market demand looks like. Appreciate it.

02:53 Claire Boston

Thanks, Brad.