Mortgage Rates Explode Higher. Anything Quoted Before Right Now is LONG Gone

If you received a mortgage rate quote any time in the past few days or weeks, unless it was at the end of the business day on Monday, March 14th, you're looking at a relic of a bygone era.  Print it out and hang it up in the halls of Woulda, Shoulda, Coulda.  This is actually good advice for any moment in time (after all, you might be reading this article on some day other than March 14th!).  Specifically, mortgage rates can change rapidly during the day, and massively from week to week even though they can also be very boring for months on end.

Suffice it to say that 2022 has not been one of the boring times for rates.  It's also not been a good time for rates between inflation, the Federal Reserve's response to inflation, and yet more inflation driven indirectly by the war in Ukraine.  Today's spike was a triple whammy.  Traders are protesting the stern attitudes among major central banks.  High inflation remains intact.  And now potential progress in peace talks (yes, we'll also believe it when we see it) is leading traders to sell bonds they recently bought in the process of seeking safe havens due to war-related uncertainty.

When investors sell bonds, yields/rates move higher.  That began happening early today and it continued to happen throughout the trading session.  Ongoing momentum meant mortgage lenders were forced to issue multiple mid-day reprices (recalling previously-available rates in favor of new, higher rate offerings).  

In the very best cases, some lenders are only .125% higher in rate (to put that in perspective, few individual days see bigger moves).  Other lenders are closer to 0.25% higher.  That puts today in a league with fewer than 10 players over the past decade.  The average conventional 30yr fixed rate is easily up and over 4.25% now, with lenders anywhere from 4.375 to 4.625% depending on the scenario.