After home equity surged in 2023, average gains slowed last year before falling into negative territory over the past 12 months, Cotality said.

For 2026, the mortgage industry operating environment will improve, while nonbank financial metrics should be within Fitch’s rating criteria sensitivities.

Rohit Chopra is named senior advisor to the Democratic Attorneys General Association’s working group on consumer protection and affordability; Flagstar Bank adds additional wealth-planning capabilities to its private banking division; Chime promotes three members of its executive leadership team; and more in this week’s banking news roundup.

The executive order described state legislation on artificial intelligence as a cumbersome patchwork, and pledged to develop a national framework.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development announced the FHA-insured loan caps for low- and high-cost areas, which are set based on conforming loan limits.

Friday saw mortgage rates move back up near the highest levels of the week, and thus the highest levels of the past 3 months. Thus ends another week where mortgage rates end higher despite a Fed rate cut. We’ve beaten this horse to death, but here are the two key reasons Fed rate cuts don’t necessarily result in lower mortgage rates, in as few words as possible:
 Different Kinds of Rates

Fed Funds Rate = loans of 24 hours or less. 
Mortgage rates = loans up to 30 years. 
Rates can have vastly different behavior when they apply to loans of vastly different time frames

Vastly different levels of timeliness

Fed only meets to consider rate cuts 8 times a year whereas mortgage rates move daily. 
As such, mortgage rates can get in position well in advance of the Fed actually cutting.

All told, this week’s Fed announcement had only a small, temporary impact on financial markets, and it was completely reversed on Friday. In contrast, the upcoming week actually has significant new market movers. These include Retail Sales for October, CPI inflation data for November, and the much-anticipated November jobs report (as well as half of the October jobs report). Unlike the Fed rate cut, markets can’t accurately predict how these reports will come out. If they’re mostly stronger than expected, rates will break up and out of their recent range. If the reports are weaker, rates should retreat back down into that same range.

“What happened with the DSCR appraisal issue in Baltimore earlier this year?” Good question. Baltimore is not alone: This week we have investors either pricing themselves out of, or ceasing loans from, the Philly market for certain non-owner loans.) The whole Baltimore thing seems to have quieted down, and up until recently the last news coming in October although this week along came, “Baltimore is striking fear into private lenders across the country.” “Over the past three years, businesses connected to Benjamin Eidlisz purchased more than 700 houses in Baltimore. Through a subsidiary called Loan Funder LLC, Roc Capital financed at least $35 million of these deals, according to a Banner review of property records. That money was used to purchase and refinance at least 224 homes in Baltimore. Today, 70 percent of those homes are in foreclosure, records show.” (Today’s podcast can be found here and this week’s are sponsored by Lenders One. Lenders One is dedicated to helping independent mortgage bankers, banks and credit unions reduce costs, improve profitability, and operate competitively in the mortgage industry and within their communities. Hear an interview with iEmergent’s Bernard Nossouli on why mortgage demand is better predicted by bottom-up, borrower-level and local-market signals than by national macro assumptions, while still requiring vigilance for structural inventory gaps, demographic shifts, and policy shocks that lenders and policymakers must factor in to understand true housing opportunity.)

There’s a noticeable divergence between long and short term bonds since the Fed announcement, and it’s becoming more pronounced today.  We can consider a few different reasons with the most basic being that the Fed rate cut outlook keeps shorter-term yields locked down at lower levels thus forcing the long end of the curve to absorb more of the selling impulse on selling days. As far as 2yr yields are concerned, it’s not even really a selling day (they’re currently DOWN microscopically). Meanwhile, 10yr yields are almost 4bps higher.

We can also consider an underlying concern among traders that was encapsulated in a comment this morning from Fed’s Goolsbee, who said there was little to suggest the labor market was decaying fast enough to warrant this week’s rate cut, especially in the absence of more timely econ data. The tacit conclusion is that if next Tuesday’s jobs report is strong, markets will increasingly feel like the Fed just made a mistake.  Last but not least, the least stressful thesis is that 2025 ended on Fed day and everything we see between now and the 2nd week of January is noise.  Choose your own adventure. 

Treasury Secretary Bessent said FSOC is readjusting its approach to avoid stifling growth in moves with implications for capital, technology and mortgages.

ETHZilla partnered with Zippy to bring manufactured home chattel loans on-chain as tokenized real-world assets.