Redfin's weekly read landed this morning: homes going under contract fell 3.7% week over week, the steepest weekly decline since 2022 and a five-month low, with rising mortgage rates named as the cause. That is the first hard demand number to line up with what the retail rate has been doing. Bankrate's 30-year sits at 6.79% this morning — three basis points above yesterday, eight above last week, twenty-three above a month ago. New listings ticked up in the same week. More supply meeting less demand is a different market than the one you were quoting in June.
Yesterday's brief led with the quarterly refunding: $125 billion, coupon sizes unchanged, supply off the board for the quarter, and the 30-year easing four basis points to 6.76%. That easing reversed today. The refunding still matters mainly as the absence of a catalyst — with supply settled, tomorrow's jobs report is the only scheduled event left this week that can move the tape.
Two reads on the demand picture, and they are less contradictory than they look — they are running on different clocks. Scotsman Guide reported Monday that July marked the eighth straight month of rising pending sales, driven by price cuts, with one in five listings carrying a reduction. Redfin's number is weekly and current. Read together: sellers have been buying demand with price cuts all year, and this week the rate move outran the discount. Zillow's Q2 print says something similar from the revenue side — total revenue up 18% to $772 million, mortgage revenue up 75% to $84 million, and still a $4 million net loss alongside a 7% workforce cut. Volume is being bought, not found.
The 10-year's most recent print, August 4, was 4.63%, down from 4.75% at the end of July — the retail 30-year moved the other way over the same stretch. That gap is spread, not direction, and the practical read is that the bond rally is not currently reaching your rate sheet. Mortgage News Daily's take is that a Hormuz development is the single biggest opportunity between now and tomorrow's payrolls, and could matter more than the print itself. Tomorrow at 8:30 ET brings both nonfarm payrolls and the unemployment rate; jobless claims at 199,000 were essentially flat on the prior week, which sets up a print with no strong prior. The next FOMC is September 15–16 and it carries a Summary of Economic Projections, so whatever tomorrow does to expectations has six weeks to compound before the Fed formally reprices its own outlook.
On the product and regulatory side: Lower launched ONE by Lower, a conventional 1%-down program pairing a 1% borrower contribution with a lender-funded grant billed at 2% but capped at $4,500 — which means the effective grant drops below 2% on any purchase above $225,000. Run the actual dollar figure before you quote it against a competitor's 3% program. Flyhomes and Figure paired up to fund Buy Before You Sell bridge loans, targeting up to $2.4 billion in annual volume. Treasury and the IRS issued guidance on the permanent expansion of the paid family and medical leave credit, which touches your file only where employer-paid leave shows up in income documentation. In real estate: Compass CEO Robert Reffkin called MLSs anti-consumer while a House subcommittee seeks records on MRED and state attorneys general review the Compass–Anywhere deal; Zillow and Realtracs closed a data license with explicit AI-use guardrails; CRMLS chief Art Carter told HousingWire he expects more litigation and sees industry-wide AI blindspots; and HouseMe.ai launched in seven mid-Atlantic markets with direct MLS feeds. An IDC study covered by HousingWire found closings still slow and underwriting still heavily manual even at lenders adding AI — worth knowing when a borrower asks why the process takes what it takes.
list every unlocked file scheduled to close before September 15 and call each borrower before tomorrow's 8:30 ET payrolls print. One sentence on where their rate is right now and what tomorrow could do to it is the whole task — and it is a much better call to make today than Friday afternoon.