Loan Officers: Today, Fannie/Freddie updated their income tables for FTHB and Home Ready | Home Possible mortgages. I'm curious to hear what impact your region had. The DC region (Northern Virginia - DC - $$ parts of Maryland) increased 1.3%, and the Baltimore MSA, 0.5%. In a way that did surprise me, as most of my homebuyers experienced decent raises this year. More evidence of the K-Shaped economy being real...

Except that milkshake on the right will still be unavailable…

I can relate…

First summer lax trip in the books. Five hour drive to Carolina Friday evening…to drive five hours back last night. I can do a five hour mountain bike ride and have more energy the day after, yet those drives just suck all the energy out of me. Why is that?!

Today is clearly a “sell it all” kind of day…

For simple minds like mine, this is the easiest way to reconcile paradoxically strong NFP. There's also been much more noise in the data since last October (evidence of gov shutdown data collection challenges)

This is exactly how I felt the first time I tested out my wife’s readers. I thought I could literally see each cell in my fingers…

These are so funny…especially the hot dog part…and the name Jeff

A big reason why I’m seeing so much strength in my local housing market right now!

The cost of credit reports really is insane...I have a son co-signing with his father...and the closed loan credit report fee is $750...$375 each. That's wild.

I continue to see much lower home insurance premiums coming in…anyone else seeing that. To my surprise, it’s AllState, State Farm, and USAA. Many that I started quoting $3,500-$4,800 are coming in at the mid-$2k range. Hopefully a sign of future disinflationary pressures…

Loan Officers: We just switched from Polly to OptimalBlue for our pricing engine...and I have to say I'm really not a fan of OB. We switched away from Polly because they had so many backend errors and pricing issues that cost us some serious money. I'm shocked they make you manually enter the loan amount instead of just selecting an LTV... it continues to shock me how these widely used platforms are so poorly built.

The worst combo for rates is a stable-to-strong economy/jobs, persistent high energy costs, and continually bloating deficit. It certainly feels like that is exactly what we are getting.

How do I know work-from-home is dying? Easy - all of my work calls are now between 8am-9am, at lunch, or beginning at 4:30 and going until 8pm. The days of talking all day freely are gone...we are back to the old world!

So remember that quiet May I talked about, well the past few days caught on fire in the DC Metro area. New contracts are flowing and I've had, on average, 5 offers per home....but the kicker to this is, all those were priced over $1.75m. The middle market is still very mixed/soft. For DC, that is single-family homes < $ 800k and all condos. I had three offers on those this past weekend, and in each scenario, our offer was the only offer.

Quick update on DC-Baltimore metro housing. We just had our worst May for new credit pulls since 2022. The drop was quite significant MoM, down about 30%. On a normal-ish year, it would be down about 5-10% from April. I remember a few years ago doing a poll on my clients, and 5.5% was the magic rate that made people get very active. We started seeing that activity in late Q1, early Q2. That energy shifted... the question now is whether a reversal brings it back, or if this year fizzles out like recent years. TBD... All that said, the four offers I've had out this past week were all competitive with escalations in the 3-15% range...so while I say it's been slowing, it's certainly not dead everywhere.

So true. I’ve said so many times, “yeah, I get that, but I really liked that guy!” I’ve hired mostly competent but very likable over extremely competent and…weird, egotistical, brash, etc and rarely ever had regrets.

This is nuts!! Can you imagine?!?