The marketing story worth your time today is not a rate. HousingWire reports that criminals used 79 dormant domains owned by Nashville's Ashton Real Estate Group to send spoofed email under the team's name, without ever getting into an email account. The domains were sitting unused in a registrar account, and the messages carried the team's sender name. Two things follow for an LO who markets by email. First, a domain you own and never send from can still be used against your clients, and the article's consultant notes that schemes like this often carry fake invoices and wire-transfer requests. Second, that traffic can drag down the domain's standing with inbox providers, which pushes your real rate updates and closing emails toward spam. After the team turned on email authentication, unauthorized message reports fell from 235 in five weeks to 43 in the next five, and those were rejected rather than delivered.
On rates, Bankrate's 30-year reads 7.57%, the top of its 90-day range of 6.59% to 7.57%, and CPI lands tomorrow, Wednesday, October 14, at 8:30 am Eastern. If you pre-wrote your two post-CPI messages over the weekend, they are ready to go. The fresh angle from today's numbers is the government side: Bankrate's FHA and VA 30-year both read 7.22%, 35 bps under conventional, which is about $95 a month in principal and interest on a $400K loan before FHA's mortgage insurance or VA's funding fee. For a buyer stretching at 7.57%, that is a comparison worth sending.
The tactical move this week is trust as content. A short, plain warning about wire fraud, sent before closing, protects the client and shows you looking out for them at the moment their money moves. Pair it with the housekeeping your clients never see: list every domain your brand has ever registered, including old team names and campaign landing pages, mark the ones that actually send email, and have your IT provider set the rest to reject any mail that claims to come from them. The same check on your sending domain protects the deliverability of everything else you send.
send every buyer with a closing on the calendar a two-line note telling them you will never send wiring instructions by email, and that they should call you at the number they already have before moving any money.