Wednesday, December 31, 2008

BUEK! RateWatch New Year's Eve!

What is it with the "Eve-s" this year?  Thanksgiving Eve was a
great day for rates, so was Christmas Eve, and now New Year's Eve sees
a bump down because of the Fed announcement that it will start buying
mortgage-backed securities in January.  Remember how I predicted rates
would go lower?

 

Appears I was right.

 

There are limited - LIMITED - programs back under 5% today, but
this isn't the big move.  Most traders are out for the holiday and I
predict most of the momentum on bonds will be after the new year. 
We'll be RateWatching extra hard come next Monday.  Stay tuned.

 

Meantime, if you want to know where your loan would be, rate-wise,
shoot me an email.  You could call, but I might not get back to you
before the 5th.

 


BUEK!  That's Hungarian for Happy New Year.  No, really.  It is.  You can look it up.

 



Cj

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

RateWatch Wednesday

Another bailout on the books, but nobody seems to know what it's going to consist of, except lots and lots of dough, though not as much as Detroit wants. The stock market therefore doesn't know what direction to go. That's good enough for bond traders, who are buying short maturities in quantities never before seen. Traders are willing to buy bonds that have ZERO interest, just to have some place to park their money. There's still a lot of progress that needs to be made in the credit markets, folks. Things are not back to normal. Not by a long chalk.
What does that mean to you? Well, bonds are still attractive, meaning that mortgage rates are low and still seeing downward pressure. This is probably a good place to address Secretary Hank Paulsen's comments about driving mortgage rates to 4.5%. Paulsen is not in charge of mortgage rates. He can direct the Treasury to buy billions of dollars' worth of mortgage-backed securities and drop the rates for those a ways, but banks will not then necessarily drop mortgage rates just because Hank says so. The international bond market is a whale of a lot larger than the Secretary's purchasing authority. Nobody I know is betting on rates being a great deal lower than they are right now.
That said, by virtue of being on this list, you can be added to our exclusive RateLocker program, where we watch for a specific rate for you, and when we get it, we lock it, so you don't have to be glued to CNBC all day (which, incidentally, wouldn't help much). It's a service we provide; it costs you nothing but a phone call.
For now: 30-year fixed, conventional, 20% equity, owner-occ, 720+ credit = 5.375% with FHA rates about the same (accomodates higher LTVs and worse credit scores and cash out).

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