The average weekly mortgage rate for conforming 30-year fixed mortgages rose to 6.43%, the highest since October 2025, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association today.
This weekly measure of mortgage rates is once again solidly in the middle of the 6% to 7% range that has prevailed since mid-2022, and that before 2008 was considered relatively low to normal.
It’s just that the Fed’s QE, which included the purchase of trillions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities, had repressed overall interest rates, and specifically mortgage rates, to recklessly low levels – 30-year mortgage rates below 3% even as inflation was shooting toward 9% – which had triggered the fantastical home-price explosion through mid-2022 that left prices beyond where they make economic sense.
And so annual home resales have plunged by 23% from 2019 in each of the past three years, mortgage applications to purchase a home have collapsed by 35% from the same period in 2019, the industry has been decimated, and the housing market has been frozen, now in its fourth year, whilesupply of resale single-family homes surged to the highest in 9 yearsandinventories of new completed single-family homes reached the highest since 2009.
And the much hoped-for and hyped spring selling season, on the expectations of miraculously lower mortgage rates, is already turning into a dud once again.
Mortgage applications to purchase a homefell in the current survey week for a miserably low beginning of the year and remain near rock-bottom levels, down by 35% from the same period in 2019.
That drop of roughly 35% from the same period in 2019 has prevailed in February and March, after a slight improvement late last year and into January.
Purchase mortgage applications are a measure of demand for homes that may become actual home sales in the future and are therefore a forward-looking indicator of home sales. And it’s not looking good for the spring selling season.
সূত্র: Wolf Street
ক্যাটাগরি: অর্থনীতি ও ব্যবসা