Real Estate Refresh

I was working away yesterday when I glanced at mortgage bonds and saw they had shot into the green 30 basis points. I was like uhh what happened?!  Then I opened Instagram and everyone was losing their minds about Trump’s announcement that he’s directing the government to purchase $200 billion in mortgage-backed securities in order to lower mortgage rates. This is called quantitative easing and is the other, less known, level the Fed has at its disposal to stimulate the econo

If you’re a first-time homebuyer, you’ve probably been told the same thing for years:  “Just wait for rates to come down.”   It sounds logical. It feels responsible.  It’s also the reason a lot of people never make it into the housing market at all.  Over the past 12 years helping hundreds of first time homebuyers, I know this to be a fact: housing affordability isn’t won when interest rates are the lowest.  It’s won when competition is manageable and buyers have leverage.  T

Imagine a pilot trying to fly a plane in a cockpit without any dashboard or instruments. Like mid-flight, all the screens went dark and the tower stopped relating any relevant info about weather or other flight patterns. The Fed was that pilot this week, trying to land the plane blindly. Why? We are on day 30 and counting of a government shutdown so they didn’t have any of the data or key reports they usually do when they meet and make an interest rate decision. The market fe