Wednesday at 2:00 p.m. Eastern is the most predictable attention spike on the mortgage calendar, and almost nobody plans for it. The FOMC statement hits the wire, every consumer outlet runs a mortgage-rate headline inside the hour, and your database reads it as "rates just changed." That question is coming to your inbox whether or not you prepared for it. The only variable is whether you answer it Wednesday afternoon or Friday morning, and the difference between those two is entirely a matter of having written the explainer before the news rather than after it. This is a rare content week where you know the exact minute the demand arrives.
Be careful what you promise with it. Daily 30-year pricing is 6.75%, the top of its 90-day range of 6.30% to 6.75%, and nine basis points higher than a month ago — there is no drop to announce, and a Fed headline paired with a vague "rates are moving" post reads as a promise the borrower will check against Google within the hour. The refi math is unchanged and narrow: past clients above 7.5% save roughly $203 a month on a $400,000 loan, and the 7.25% cohort about $134. What is genuinely new on the sheet is the jumbo premium, now 15 basis points over conforming — about $70 a month on a $700,000 loan. In a higher-price metro that is a better piece of content than any rate post, because it is a structural point about how a loan is built rather than a pitch about where rates went.
The tactical move is a two-version explainer, drafted before Wednesday. Both versions say the same thing, because the useful content does not depend on the decision: the Fed sets the rate banks charge each other overnight, your mortgage rate is set by the bond market, and that is why a mortgage rate can rise on a day the Fed cuts. Record whichever version fits at 2:15 and publish inside the hour, while the headline is still doing the work of getting attention for you. Pair it with a lower-lift second asset this week: the summer Wall Street Journal/Realtor.com market ranking published this morning across the 200 most populous metros. Pull your metro's line, post it with one sentence of interpretation, and you have credible local data you did not have to pay for or produce — which consistently outperforms national commentary in a local business.
write both versions of the Wednesday explainer and get them into your drafts folder before the end of the day, so Wednesday is a recording task and not a writing task.