The August new residential construction report is the day's real signal, and it is a supply story hiding inside a soft headline. Census and HUD put housing completions at a 1,128,000 annual rate — down 11.9% from July and 27.1% from a year ago — while single-family starts moved the other way, up 7.6% to 918,000. Permits held roughly steady at 1,394,000, off 2.7% on the month but still 3.5% above last August. Builders are breaking ground and not finishing. For anyone with a buyer waiting on a new build, that gap is a timeline problem arriving over the next two quarters, not a statistic.
Yesterday's brief covered the FOMC's quarter-point move to a 3.75%–4.00% target range and a Summary of Economic Projections that put the funds rate at 4.1% at the end of both 2026 and 2027. Nothing since has changed that picture. The next meeting is October 27–28 and does not carry a dot plot.
Pending home sales landed the same morning and tell a compatible story. NAR's index read 71.2 in August, up 0.3% from July but down 4.7% from a year ago, with the South (+2.3%) and West (+3.0%) offsetting declines in the Northeast (−4.2%) and Midwest (−1.6%). Contracts are still being signed into a 7% rate; what is thinning is the finished product to sign them on. Consumer sentiment at 47.8 against 51.7 the prior month says the household mood is running worse than the transaction data.
On rates: Bankrate's conventional 30-year printed 7.09% today, 3 bps above yesterday and a fresh 90-day high. That series has run from 6.47% to 7.09% over the window and now sits 42 bps above where it was a month ago. Freddie Mac's weekly PMMS — a separate survey, quoted here as its own series — came in Thursday at 6.95%, its highest since January 2025 and a 19 bp weekly jump, the largest one-week move since April 2025. Rates are higher than they were a week ago and a month ago, and every lock conversation today should start from that fact. Fannie Mae's ESR group trimmed its single-family origination forecast to $2.12 trillion for 2026, from $2.17 trillion, and to $2.28 trillion for 2027, while still projecting 30-year rates end 2026 near 6.8%.
On the regulatory and industry side: Brian Johnson's nomination as CFPB director advanced out of the Senate Banking Committee on a 13–11 vote and now goes to the full Senate — nothing about supervision or examination posture changes before a confirmation vote. UWM says roughly one in four borrowers in its current pipeline draws a more favorable result under VantageScore 4.0 than under Classic FICO, which is worth knowing before you re-pull a marginal file. The OCC published its September enforcement actions, and the Federal Reserve's Q2 Financial Accounts, released September 11, put household real estate value and owners' equity at record highs — the standing argument for a second-lien conversation with a borrower sitting on a 3% first. Zillow Preview listings also went live on Realtor.com this week, widening pre-MLS exposure your buyers may see before their agent does.
pull your new-construction pipeline and call the builder contact on every file with an estimated completion inside 120 days. Completions fell 27% year over year, so a delivery date quoted back in June is exactly the one most likely to move — and you would rather reset the borrower's expectation now than scramble against a rate lock that expires while the house is still unfinished.