Quick, refi!

Mortgage rates in the US slipped below 6.80% on the MBA’s gauge in Wednesday’s update, down 9bps from last week.

Looking back over the last five weeks, the net change for the average 30-year fixed is -19bps, hardly enough to break the gridlock gripping America’s housing market, but enough to incentivize refi activity, which increased 7% over the last week (and 40% from the same period a year ago).

As the simple figure reminds you: This is basically a sideways grind, notwithstanding the marginal relief highlighted in the shaded grey area. Rates are stuck in a range between 6.50% and 7% and have been since the election.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is exactly what Scott Bessent swore he’d “fix.” He said the administration would work to bring down 10-year Treasury yields because that’d knock into borrowing costs across the real economy.

To be fair, benchmark US yields are lower since the start of the year, but not by enough to move the needle for people trying to make the math work on a home purchase. That math’s daunting such that buyers would need 100bps or more of rates relief to make a difference.

Apropos, purchase activity (as distinct from refis) was “essentially flat over the week, as overall uncertainty continues to hold homebuyers out of the market,” MBA VP Joel Kan said Wednesday.

If you’re wondering what the lowest mortgage rates since “Liberation Day” mean for stretched budgets, Redfin’s Dana Anderson did the math. A buyer with $3,000 to spend on a monthly payment (that’s basically the national median) “gained $16,000 in purchasing power in the last five weeks,” she wrote, in an July 1 update.

Such a buyer can now swing a $455,000 home, which is to say a home that’s about $32,000 “nicer” than the typical house, using the median sale price for existing homes on the NAR’s data.