What’s up, everybody? Sean Zalmanoff up here with this Mortgage Rate Update. Hey, I hope you guys all had a great holiday. This is our last Mortgage Rate Update of the year and our very last one until next week. We will see you then.
First of all, let’s talk about fed news. The Federal Reserve who has been helping to lower mortgage rates by buying mortgage backed securities has said they were going to continue to buy about 40 billion in mortgage backed securities per month. 40 billion. Yeah, the numbers are just crazy, but to date so far, in December, they’ve bought 90 billion and that has not gotten this last week’s reporting. They’ve consistently been buying for the last few months, close to a hundred billion. That means rates are going to stay pretty good for you.
We’ve also had an uptick the last couple of weeks in new claims for jobless numbers, which is just something to note as they had been falling for quite a few months.
We also got some big news late yesterday evening. The stimulus bill that we talked about that was passed last week is now signed and into law. Families are going to be able to get up to $2,400 in stimulus. If you are married and have two children is kind of how that maximum can work out for you. Individuals are getting $600. There is a lot of relief inside of that bill on the payment protection plan for small businesses, which is more important. Now, everything’s important inside of this, but incredibly important as small businesses are the engine that make up our economy and have the least amount of deep pockets to be able to weather this financial storm. Fortunately, there’s been some good relief for businesses.
Now, the House this week is going to be voting on a 2K or not 2K. Not Y2K as we had, well, gosh, 20 years ago today almost, but this is going to be whether to increase the direct payment stimulus from $600 to $2,000. This is likely to overwhelmingly passed the House and likely to die either a voted death or just a death that doesn’t even get heard in the Senate. More to come on that, but we’ll see. That’s all we do at this point is wait and see what’s going on.
These factors though, do perpetuate for us a good cycle of interest rates ahead of us. Like we talked about last week, when the financial crisis came through, there was that the great recession, 2007, 2008, there was about 3.4 million homes on the market. Today, that’s less than half that. There’s about 1.4 million homes on the market. Even with all of this craziness going on right now, there is still probably a strong, strong likelihood that prices are going to increase, which I believe Wednesday of this week, we’ll see the Case-Shiller index. It’s the national survey of 20 different cities in the United States to see what home prices are doing nationally. You know what? Next week, we will show you exactly what they’re doing here in St. Louis. We have some pretty cool graphs that we can break down. Stay tuned for that.
Hey, if you need anything, call us. The numbers are below. You know how to reach us. We appreciate you. It has been an amazing year. We’ve been able to help a lot of people and have fortunately been one of the industries that that has done pretty darn well. If we can help you, if you need to save money on your mortgage, if you’re buying a house, we’re here for you for that, too. Sean Zalmanoff. We appreciate you all. Have an awesome and safe New Year. Bye, you all.
