Nine months of price cuts just rebuilt your callback list

Realtor.com's July housing report landed this morning and it is the most usable marketing fact of the week. Asking prices fell for a ninth consecutive month at a near-record pace, homes are selling slightly faster than they were a year ago, and pending sales rose for an eighth straight month. Strip out the commentary and what you have is a market clearing on price while rates sit still. That is a fundamentally different story than the one most LOs have been telling since spring, and almost nobody in your market is telling it yet because everyone is still watching the rate line.

Be honest about that rate line, because your borrowers will check it. The 30-year is 6.78% — flat for three sessions, up 8 basis points on the week and 23 on the month. There is no rate relief in this story and there is not likely to be any before Friday's jobs report. The relief is coming from the other side of the equation entirely, and it is worth real money: a buyer whose target house dropped $20,000 finances roughly $130/month less at today's rate. For the borrower who walked in February because the payment came in $150 over their number, that is the whole gap — closed by the seller, not the Fed. Your file notes from that conversation are still accurate about their budget; they are just no longer accurate about the market.

So the play this week is a callback list built on the price axis instead of the rate axis. Pull every purchase lead from roughly the last three to twelve months that stalled or went quiet on affordability, and re-run their original target — same neighborhood, same price band, today's list prices. You are not calling to say rates dropped, because they did not, and a borrower who hears that will fact-check you in ten seconds. You are calling to say the house moved. That is a claim they cannot check on a rate site, it is specific to their file, and it gives you a reason to reach out that none of your competitors are using this month.