Critical Cliff's Notes For Today's Mortgage Rate News (We're Not Below 5% Anymore)

Regular readers are all too familiar with my fairly regular habit of explaining discrepancies between reality and the typical mortgage rate headlines on Thursdays.  What’s up with Thursday?  That’s when Freddie Mac releases its weekly mortgage rate survey. Freddie’s survey is the longest-running, most deeply entrenched catalog of historical mortgage rates in the industry.  It serves as the foundation of strategic market analysis in several sectors.  It is the most widely-cited source for the news media’s mortgage rate coverage.  It is even relied upon for certain calculations that determine whether loans violate certain lending laws.   All of the above is tremendously unfortunate by the time we consider just how stale the information can be.  Not to put too fine a point on it, the survey is best thought of as measuring rate changes from Monday to Monday, but waiting to report that number until Thursday morning at 10am ET!   Why the delay? The survey’s official response window runs through Wednesday.  In that sense, the Thursday morning release time seems more reasonable. Unfortunately a vast majority of the responses are in by Monday.  Freddie officially states that most responses are received on Tuesday, but this is either not true or those responses are coming in early Tuesday morning before lenders update their rates for the day.  This is a longstanding contention of mine and if there was ever a report that confirmed it, it’s today’s!  Here’s why:
Source: mortgagenewsdaily.comNew feed