Realtor.com published its summer retrospective this morning and it is the counter-narrative your borrowers have not seen. Across the 50 largest metros, the share of listings taking a price cut fell this summer — not because sellers got stubborn, but because they priced lower from the start, corrected faster when they missed, and pulled listings off the market less often. The result was the busiest summer for contract signings since 2022. That matters to your marketing because it contradicts the story most buyers absorbed over the last three months, which was some version of nobody is buying and prices are about to break. Both things were true at once: sellers got realistic and buyers came back. Nobody wrote that headline, so you get to.
The rate side gives you nothing to work with, and that is worth being blunt about internally. Mortgage News Daily has the conventional 30-year at 6.77% for a fourth straight session, roughly seven basis points above where it sat a month ago, with Freddie Mac's weekly survey at 6.65% for the week ending August 20. Rates have stabilized in the high 6s rather than started down, and every forecast revision this month has moved the same direction. So do not build this week's outreach on a rate story that is not there. Build it on payment certainty and on price-side leverage. Core PCE lands Friday, August 28 and the next FOMC is September 15-16 with new economic projections — those are the two dates that can actually change the conversation, and both are far enough out that you can draft the content now instead of scrambling on the day.
The price-side leverage is real and quantified. HousingWire's reporting out of Dallas-Fort Worth puts current builder incentives at $20,000 to $25,000 and makes the case they beat waiting for a half-point rate improvement. Run it honestly for your own market: on a $400,000 loan, going from 6.77% to 6.27% saves about $131 a month. Over a realistic eight-year hold that is roughly $12,600, against a builder credit north of $20,000 available on a contract signed this quarter. The rate wins only if the borrower keeps the loan for the full thirty years, which almost none of them do, and only if the half-point actually arrives, which nobody is currently forecasting. That comparison, run on a specific borrower's numbers rather than a generic example, is the highest-converting message you can send this week.
pick the three fence-sitters who told you they are waiting for a 5 and send each one a two-line text with their own loan amount — the payment today, and the dollar value of a builder credit in their price range — and ask which number they want to talk about first.