After a disappointing spring and summer, the housing market could start to heat up as fall approaches with the latest plunge in mortgage rates.
Bond yields tumbled on Friday as the weaker-than-expected jobs report raised expectations for rate cuts from the Federal Reserve. The 10-year Treasury yield dived 10 basis points to 4.076%, the lowest since April.
Meanwhile, the average rate on the 30-year fixed mortgage sank 16 basis points to 6.29%, according to Mortgage Daily News. That marked the biggest single-day decline since August 2024 and the lowest level since Oct. 3 2024.
“Many lenders are priced better than 10/3/24 at rates of 6.125%, and many lenders will be quoting in the high 5’s today,” Mortgage News Daily Chief Operating Officer Matt Graham said in a post on X on Friday.
While mortgage rates similarly plunged a year ago, the situation today is different. Back then, like now, the unemployment rate was ticking higher, triggering the Sahm rule and raising fears of a recession. Expectations for Fed rate cuts jumped, sending mortgage rates down.
The Fed did lower rates, but surprised Wall Street by starting with a jumbo-sized half-point cut. Then the jobs data suddenly improved, raising fears that the Fed’s cuts might overheat the economy. Bond yields and mortgage rates went back up.
For much of this year, the job market appeared resilient, even as President Donald Trump’s tariffs were keeping inflation—and mortgage rates—elevated.
Then markets got jolt last month with the July jobs report that drastically upended the outlook. And on Friday, the Labor Department reported that payrolls grew by just 22,000 jobs in August, well below forecasts, with revisions showing June actually saw a decline.
Now Wall Street widely expects the Fed to kick off an easing cycle this month as policymakers shift their concerns from tariff-induced inflation to a tariff-induced job slump. In a note on Saturday, Torsten Sløk, chief economist at Apollo Global Management, observed that job growth in tariff-impacted sectors is negative, while sectors not directly impacted by tariffs are declining but still in positive territory.
In a separate post on Friday, Graham acknowledged parallels to 2024, but added “last year’s rug pull was driven by a big reversal in econ data. If data stays downbeat this time around, no reason to expect a repeat on the same scale, if at all.”
If borrowers can secure mortgage rates in the low 6% range or below, that would represent a huge improvement from May, then they were above 7%.
As home prices and borrowing costs remained high throughout the critical spring selling season and the summer, the housing market saw minimal activity as prospective buyers remained on the sidelines.
In fact, the situation was becoming so severe that minutes from the Fed’s last meeting revealed concern among some policymakers about the housing market.
Sales of existing homes have largely been flat this year, even as the number of listings has climbed, suggesting demand is weak. That has suppressed home prices. In addition, construction of new single-family homes remains lethargic, and building permits have mostly declined this year.
As a result, the number of U.S. homeowner households dipped by 0.1% in the second quarter from a year ago to 86.2 million, the first such decline since 2016.
Chen Zhao, Redfin’s head of economics research, blamed “rising home prices, high mortgage rates, and economic uncertainty, [which] have made it increasingly difficult to own a home.”
