Instead of offering tax incentives to lure corporate headquarters, some rural cities are offering ‘relocation bonuses’ of up to $10,000 & a new bike to draw young professionals working remotely to their towns.
Rates – improved slightly this week as Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS) bounced up, breaking outside of the narrow December trading range. This move higher brings MBS back to historic highs (as MBS trade higher, mortgage rates move lower). Rates are down roughly 1% from this time last year.
Jobs – the number of people filing for unemployment moved lower for the second consecutive week. Claims are back under the 800K level (4X pre-covid). The number of people on continuing claims dropped by roughly 100K to 5.2M and Pandemic Unemployment Assistance Claims dropped 811K to 8.5M (this is mostly due to benefits expiring). 14.5M people are still receiving unemployment assistance of some form.
Appreciation – Case Shiller, the gold standard of home appreciation, showed that homes appreciated over 8% October 2019 – October 2020. On a $300K home that’s a $25,000 increase in equity without factoring amortization through mortgage payments.
Forbearance – the share of mortgage loans in forbearance is approximately 5.5% roughly 2.7M Americans are in forbearance.
Happy New Year everyone! Thank you to my awesome clients and everyone that partnered with me in 2020, I feel very fortunate to be in a field that wasn’t negatively impacted by Covid. Thanks to your support we had a wonderful year! I was excited to do loans in all the States I’m licensed in (OR, WA, CA, ID, & FL) and help friends and family members purchase homes for the first time, move into their dream home, purchase their first investment property, pull equity for investments, increase cash flow, reduce debt, buy homes for their parents, and even get rid of mortgage payments (first reverse mortgage!). This was the first year that the majority of my business came from professional referrals (thank you!!) and 75% of the loans I did were purchases. Cheers to 2021!