Today is genuinely quiet on the mortgage news front — typical for a Sunday, and there's no point pretending otherwise. The weekend's only fresh news item with LO relevance was Jimmy Burgess's Sunday Inman piece "Stop experimenting with AI. Start using these 5 prompts instead" — workflow-focused, useful for any LO who has access to AI tools but hasn't built a consistent prompt library yet. Beyond that, the news cycle is on pause until Monday, when the Two Harbors shareholder vote and the next bond-market open take focus.
The rate backdrop carried over from Friday is what matters going into Monday. The 10Y closed at 4.59% — a fresh 12-month high after the Trump/Xi summit produced no de-escalation news — and Bankrate's Saturday daily 30Y print held 6.49% (90-day high). FHA and VA rates spiked 18 bps Friday and held the weekend; conventional 30Y spent its sixth straight day on the 6.45–6.49 shelf, but Friday's underlying bond move means the shelf is no longer stable into Monday. Don't lock anyone Monday morning before the bond market opens and tells you the tone.
Things you may have missed this week — items that didn't lead Friday's or Saturday's briefs but still deserve eyes. First, HousingWire's "How loan officers are saving deals as mortgage rates cross 6.6%" — practical tactics piece on buydowns, ARM pivots, and lower-LTV restructuring, required reading for any LO with active rate-sensitive pipeline this week. Second, the HUD OIG audit on HECM LESA accounts: 1,237 reverse-mortgage borrowers may see set-aside funds run dry up to six years early, with up to $258 million at risk. Material for any LO with reverse-mortgage pipeline, and a leading indicator on where HUD enforcement attention is going. Third, AD Mortgage closed a $407 million non-QM securitization — 25% Florida collateral, 979 loans backing the deal — which says the non-QM secondary market remains liquid into a rising-rate environment. Fourth, the MBA Q1 IMB production-profits data dropped: $727 per loan, up from $674 in Q4 2025. The profit print is the good headline; the cost-climb story underneath it is the one that matters.
Two regulatory-flavored items also worth noting. Mortgage News Daily covered a BLS research paper on how the agency handled missing shelter inflation data during the October 2025 government funding lapse — the technical fix to the CPI shelter component matters for anyone modeling forward inflation prints. Supreme Lending's John Luddy gave a "3 deadly sins of reverse mortgages" talk at the Reverse Mastermind Summit — useful for any LO new to the segment or trying to grow into it (paired with the HUD HECM story above, the reverse market is having a moment in coverage even if not in volume).
spend the Sunday quiet drafting your Monday-morning outreach SMS to active pipeline with quotes from Tuesday–Thursday this week. Lead with "weekend rate-move heads-up, no action needed, fresh number Monday morning." Saturday's spike and Friday's overnight 10Y move at a 12-month high will catch every borrower who checks Zillow before they check their email — be the proactive note in their inbox, not the reactive one. Schedule the SMS for 8 a.m. EST Monday before market open. Half an hour of work on a quiet Sunday saves five hours of reactive calls Monday.