NOW: Bond market is closed and there is no catalyst to report. The 30-year is 6.78%, two basis points above yesterday, which is not a move. Nothing printed, no agency filing landed, and the only mortgage content published today is analysis rather than news. The honest summary of the week is the one this brief gave Friday: up eight basis points on the week, up twenty-three on the month, and sitting six basis points under the 90-day high. That has not changed overnight and there is no reason to write it three different ways.
NEXT: The calendar is thin until Thursday and then it is not. Jobless claims and the Freddie Mac weekly survey both land August 6 — claims already ticked to 197,000 from 188,000 on the July 25 read, so a second soft print starts to look like a trend rather than noise. The jobs report and the unemployment rate follow on August 7, and that is the release with the most power to move pricing this month. CPI comes in the August 10-15 window. There is no FOMC until September 15-16, and that meeting carries a Summary of Economic Projections, so it is the next scheduled event that can reset expectations wholesale. Between now and Thursday, the only thing that moves rates is something unscheduled.
RANGE: Rather than repeat the conventional range read for a third session, look at where the products sit against each other, because that gap is unusually wide right now. Conventional 30-year is 6.78%. FHA prints 6.34% and VA 6.36% — forty-four and forty-two basis points inside conventional. Jumbo is 6.91%, only thirteen basis points over conforming, which is tight by historical standards and means a jumbo borrower is being penalized far less than they were a year ago. The 15-year at 6.11% remains sixty-seven basis points under the 30-year. The rate stack has more dispersion in it than the headline number suggests, and dispersion is where structuring earns its fee.
DO: Work the VA-eligible list. On a $500,000 loan the VA rate is roughly $139 a month cheaper than conventional in principal and interest, and there is no monthly mortgage insurance on top of it — the funding fee is financed upfront. That is the cleanest product advantage on the board today and it is chronically underworked because eligibility is not on most CRMs as a filterable field. FHA needs the more careful conversation: the 44 basis point rate advantage is about $116 a month on $400,000, but annual MIP at 0.55% runs roughly $183 a month on the same balance and does not cancel under 10% down, so the comparison turns on the mortgage insurance structure and the borrower's credit profile rather than the note rate. Do this today: pull every active purchase file and flag the ones where nobody has actually asked about military service — not the ones marked VA, the ones where the question was never put.