Two things moved the long end yesterday and both leaned your way. Treasury announced it will at least double the size of its liquidity-support buyback operations in the longer-dated nominal sectors — the 10-to-20-year and 20-to-30-year buckets go from a $2 billion maximum per operation to at least $4 billion, effective September 9 and running through the November 4 quarterly refunding. Separately, oil prices and Treasury yields fell in unison through Tuesday's session on headlines about Iran peace negotiations, which Mortgage News Daily flagged as the entire story of the day. The 10-year closed at 4.70% against 4.74% the session before, and Bankrate's 30-year conventional prints at 6.70% this morning, down five basis points from 6.75% yesterday.
If you missed yesterday's brief: seven agencies — the FDIC, NCUA, OCC, CFPB, HUD, DOJ and FHFA — rescinded the 2022 Interagency Statement on Special Purpose Credit Programs and told creditors not to rely on it going forward. That is still the compliance item of the week. If your lender offers an SPCP-backed down payment or closing-cost product, the question of whether it survives is being answered on somebody's desk right now, and you want the answer before you quote it to a borrower, not after.
The two national price gauges both landed this week and they tell a consistent story: home price growth is positive, slow, and no longer decelerating. FHFA's purchase-only index rose 2.1% year over year in the second quarter and 0.3% quarter over quarter. S&P Cotality Case-Shiller showed the national index up 1.5% year over year through June, accelerating from a revised 1.2% in May. Neither is a boom, but neither is the collapse your borrower read about on social media. Pair that with a rate that has spent the last month inside a fifteen-basis-point band and you get the most stable set of affordability inputs an LO has had to work with this year — the payment math stopped getting worse, which is a story you can actually tell.
On implications: 6.70% is near the low end of the last thirty days, where Bankrate's range has been 6.67% to 6.82%, but be straight with borrowers about the longer view — the same series bottomed at 6.47% inside the last ninety days, and today's number is about seven basis points above where it sat a month ago. Rates have stabilized in the high sixes, not fallen. Do not oversell this move. The buyback increase is worth understanding correctly too: it is liquidity support for the plumbing of the long end, not asset purchases meant to push yields down, so treat it as a reason for smoother execution rather than a rate forecast. The real swing factor is Friday's Core PCE print, and beyond it the September 15-16 FOMC meeting, which carries a Summary of Economic Projections. A file that is comfortable at today's number and closing inside three weeks is a file you lock, not a file you float into a dot plot.
On the industry side, the FTC secured an order resolving its antitrust case over the Zillow-Redfin agreement, with the Attorneys General of Arizona, Connecticut, New York, Virginia and Washington joining. The order unwinds the arrangement under which Zillow paid Redfin $100 million to exit the multifamily rental listing advertising market and requires Redfin to reenter it with committed investment and a far larger listing base. Elsewhere: UWM launched a Mortgage Matchup plugin for ChatGPT that runs affordability math and routes users to independent brokers, which is worth ten minutes of your attention as a distribution channel regardless of your channel; Rate added a top-producing Dallas branch from CrossCountry, with the branch leadership citing Spanish-language support and platform as the deciding factors; Real's REMAX transaction terms are now public, with stockholders electing stock or a cash-and-stock mix against an $80 million cash cap subject to proration; and Chrisman's commentary is tracking UAD 3.6 readiness alongside a fresh crop of digital HELOC and MSR valuation tooling. One more worth filing: Realtor.com's new-construction research found 67.2% of new-home listing views come from shoppers outside the listing's metro, against 65.4% for existing homes — if you have builder relationships, your buyer is more likely to be relocating than local, and that changes both your marketing and your pre-approval questions.
pull every locked file above 6.75% that has not funded, confirm which ones your lender's re-lock or float-down policy would actually let you improve at 6.70%, and get those calls made before Friday's Core PCE print rather than after it.