Real Estate News & Tips for Central Texas

Mortgage Rates Briefly Over 7% Before Mid-Day Improvement
Mortgage rates jumped sharply over the weekend as financial markets reacted to Moody's credit rating downgrade of the U.S. News of the downgrade broke with only minutes left in Friday's market/business day, so most of the response played out when global markets opened again late last night. Th

Mortgage Rates End Week Only Slightly Higher After Decent Recovery
The average top tier 30yr fixed rate is set to end the week just a few hundredths of a percent higher than last Friday at 6.92%. That's a victory--albeit a small one--after hitting 6.99% on Wednesday. As always, these rates refer to an index representing broad industry averages for best-case s

Mortgage Rates Catch a Break
Mortgage rates have done almost nothing but move higher in the month of May. The latest bump--seen yesterday--took the average top tier 30yr fixed rate to 6.99%. While this is fairly uneventful in the bigger picture, it was a noticeable increase from the 6.81 seen at the end of April, or the slightl

Mortgage Rates Rising Closer to 7%
In early April, amid the most volatile portion of the market's reaction to the tariff announcement, mortgage rates were officially over 7% for a single day. By the middle of the following week, they were well on their way lower, ultimately ending the month just over 6.8%. Since then, it's been tough

Mortgage Rates Hold Fairly Steady After Inflation Data
Tuesday brought the release of an economic report that has frequently been responsible for big swings in mortgage rates. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) is the earlier of the two big inflation reports from the US government, and inflation is a big deal for interest rates. In general, higher inf

Mortgage Rates Jump to 2 Week Highs After US/China Trade Talks
Tariffs and trade policy have been a new and important consideration for the bond market for just over a month now. That matters to mortgage rates because mortgage pricing is primarily determined by bond prices. The reaction function for rates is a bit complicated at first glance because

Mortgage Rates Barely Lower to End The Week
Whether it's today vs yesterday, or today vs the end of last week, the average top tier 30yr fixed mortgage rate is just a hair lower. Today's improvement was arguably a byproduct of trade related headlines this morning. Specifically, some comments suggested this weekend's negotiations between the U

Mortgage Rates Move Higher After Trade Deal
Mortgage rates moved back up to the higher levels seen earlier this week after the official announcement of a trade deal between the U.S. and the U.K. Most lenders actually began the day fairly close to yesterday's latest levels, but were ultimately forced to raise rates in response to weakness in t

Mortgage Rates Lower After Fed Announcement, But Not Because of It
There's nothing like a Fed announcement day to get almost every media outlet to run headlines that attempt to tie the day's market movement to the Fed's rate decision. The problem in today's case is that there wasn't even anything remotely resembling a decision, nor did anyone expect there to be. Ma

