The hook this week is not a number, it is a rulebook. On Thursday evening, FHFA Director Bill Pulte directed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to approve all lenders to deliver loans scored with VantageScore 4.0, expanding a program that had been limited to an approved set of lenders since it opened on May 1 under the agency's April 22 credit-score initiative. Tri-merge credit reporting stays in place; a bi-merge framework was described as under consideration, not adopted. Two days ago this brief argued that the strongest purchase conversation available was about selection rather than rate. This is the second one, and it reaches a completely different list: every borrower who was told no because of a score. Before you market any of it, get one thing in writing from your investor — are they accepting VantageScore 4.0 deliveries today, and with what documentation. The announcement came from the director publicly and through the wire and trade press; no FHFA release and no selling-guide update has posted yet, and your overlays govern your file regardless of what the GSEs will buy. Market the conversation, not a promise.
The rate is not helping you this week, so stop leading with it. Bankrate's 30-year sits at 6.83% this morning, up five over the week and two over the past month, which puts it at the top of both its 30-day band of 6.67% to 6.83% and its 90-day band of 6.47% to 6.83%. On a $400,000 loan that is roughly $2,616 a month in principal and interest. The refi list that still works is the one above 7.25% — about $113 a month of relief on that same balance — and it has been the same list for six weeks. The genuinely new list is the one the score change reaches: purchase borrowers you shelved on credit rather than on payment, and FHA borrowers two or more years in who took the government loan because their score put them there. For the second group the prize is not the rate, it is the mortgage insurance. If a rescored file plus two years of appreciation gets them to conventional at 80% loan-to-value, the monthly premium goes away entirely, which on a typical FHA balance is worth more than any rate move this year. That is worth re-running. It is not worth promising.
The tactical move is a second-opinion campaign, and it works because the trigger is external. Pull the borrowers you turned away or shelved on score in the last eighteen months and send one short message that says a scoring model change went into effect this week, that you do not yet know whether it changes their number, and that you would like to re-check it. That framing does two things a rate email cannot: it gives you a legitimate reason to reappear in an inbox where you went quiet, and it sets the expectation correctly before you pull anything, so a no costs you nothing. Log every reply as a task with a follow-up date rather than a note — this list will take weeks to work through as investors publish their positions, and the ones you cannot answer today are the ones you will want to call in October.
build the list — every declined or shelved application from the last eighteen months where credit score was the stated reason — and get your investor's written answer on VantageScore 4.0 delivery before you send the first message. The list is the asset; the answer is what lets you use it.