Home prices rose 0.2% nationally month-over-month in November, but there were an estimated 37.2% more sellers than buyers in the market, Redfin said.

Rialto Capital allegedly engineered a way to keep it in default so that the company could win extra fees over time, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday.

Patrick Terrance Donlon, CEO of Trusted American Mortgage, settled allegations from 21 states another person took industry education courses for him.

Because mortgage rates are determined by the bond market, a boring market day typically translates to a boring mortgage rate day. But that’s not entirely true today. While the level of movement is indeed very small, it only took a small movement to get the average 30yr fixed rate down to their lowest levels since the end of October.   Next week should be another slow one for rates, but things should pick up progressively as 2026 gets underway.

Bonds End Unchanged After Another Quiet Session

This is essentially placeholder commentary to serve as Friday’s recap even though no commentary is needed this week.  Bonds saw some incidental strength in the AM and weakness heading into the PM. The net effect was unchanged trading levels by the 3pm CME close. 

Market Movement Recap

10:31 AM modestly stronger overnight and sideways so far.  MBS up 3 ticks (.09) and 10yr down 1.2bps at 4.12

12:27 PM Off the best levels. MBS now unchanged and 10yr up 1bps at 4.142

02:31 PM Holding sideways with no additional weakness.  MBS unchanged and 10yr up less than 1bp at 4.138

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Although the bond market is technically open today, it might as well not be. Late year holidays (Thanksgiving, X-mas, New Year) depress volume and liquidity more than any others. Today is neither an official holiday nor an early close day, but considering Christmas fell on a Thursday and the federal employee holiday, trading is just as sparse as it was on Christmas Eve. Algorithmic trading programs are doing the vast majority of market making (i.e. determining prevailing levels for buyers and sellers). Bonds will remain sideways in a very narrow range until non-algo trades force a modest move higher or lower. At that point, yields can make a short run in the direction implied by those trades before leveling off in a sideways pattern to wait for the next legit input. If you prefer, you can disregard all of the above and simply understand that the next “real” trading in the bond market won’t happen until the week of January 5th. 

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It was a short day for the bond market that underlies mortgage rates, but a good one. A side effect of holiday weeks and early market closures is a bit of random volatility without any obvious justification. When volume and participation are low, bonds can move a bit more than they otherwise might. All that to say today’s improvement was luck of the draw, but we won’t object to the result. The average top tier 30yr fixed rate fell to the lowest level since November 25th. The caveat is that the range has been fairly narrow during that time. [thirtyyearmortgagerates]

Decent Gains With Some Help From 7yr Auction

You know it’s a holiday with an early closure if we’re talking about a 7yr Treasury auction having an impact on the bond market. To be fair, 7s have had an impact once or twice in the past, but the bar is certainly high. The holiday calendar makes the bar a bit lower as fewer determined traders are required to move the whole pile. Such was the case after the 11:30am ET auction. Bonds were already in good shape before that, but the earlier gains were more incidental than data-driven.

Econ Data / Events

Continued Claims (Dec)/13

1,923K vs — f’cast, 1897K prev

Jobless Claims (Dec)/20

214K vs 223K f’cast, 224K prev

Market Movement Recap

08:31 AM Unchanged overnight and no reaction to claims data.  MBS unchanged and 10yr down 1/10th of a bp at 4.165