Posted To: Mortgage Rate Watch
It’s Thursday and thus time once again for some seriously confusing mixed signals in the world of mortgage rate journalism. The weekly Freddie Mac rate survey is the most widely-cited source material for a majority of the mortgage rate coverage in the news. For the average consumer, it works just fine because it does a good job of capturing broad trends over time without too much noise. But for those with a vested interest in day-to-day movement (those in the process of buying or refi’ing perhaps?), Freddie’s numbers run the risk of being downright misleading depending on what the bond market is doing. The reason is simple : there’s a lag of several days between Freddie’s data collection and the press release. In practice, the survey ends up doing a great job of measuring Monday vs Monday mortgage…(read more)
