What a week! After last week’s stock market drama, the world economy and our stock market looked like they was headed for free fall. Then a new week begins. While stocks were still on the downtrend earlier this week, on the home front we had surprisingly good news. Remember good news is usually bad for interest rates.
New homes sales were up 5.4% in July after a very sad number in June. More importantly, they were up 26% year over year. New homes sales are homes being built brand new by builders. Existing home sales are buying from a regular person seller or investor who has flipped – existing is like a “pre-owned” car.
The GDP for the 2nd quarter was revised from 2.3 to 3.7%, which is a BIG jump. More data came in supporting that the US production was really higher than first calculated. These are both mortgage rate unfriendly announcements. So though it looked like interest rates would come down earlier this week on the shaky start market and investor going for quality, less risky investments, they ended up moving back into the market as the good economic data invited the investor dollars back into the stock market. Good for stock investors bad for the people wanting to lock in a mortgage rate.
After all that, interest rates remain unchanged.
Remember good news in the economy is bad news if you are locking in a fixed rate mortgage.