It's Official: Highest Rates in 3 Years (But Today's Move Was Minimal)

It was potentially a very boring or interesting day for mortgage rates, depending on where you get your news and how tuned in you were to yesterday's news.  In fact, rates moved up to new multi-year highs every single day so far this week.  Today was no exception, but it was the smallest move, by far--so small that a few lenders were actually in slightly better territory.

The notion of any lender being in slightly better territory is fairly astonishing for those getting their mortgage rate news from any source citing Freddie Mac's weekly rate survey today.  To keep a long, frequent story short, Freddie's survey is an industry standard for weekly mortgage rate tracking, but is unfortunately stale on many occasions due to its methodology.  

With the Freddie survey still apparently capturing some input from Friday March 4th in the previous release (the one that came out on March 10th), the current release (which mostly measures rates on Monday the 14th) had a lot of ground to make up by the time of today's release.  Indeed, it was the biggest week-over-week jump since 2017, and one of the 4 biggest jumps in more than a decade.

For those tuning in to daily rate changes, Freddie's +0.31 increase in 30yr fixed rates is old news.  Adjusting for the 0.8 points of upfront cost in the survey numbers, the "no points" effective rate would be closer to 4.41% we reported on Monday.  Since then, the average 30yr has moved up another 0.09%, ultimately hitting 4.5% today for the first time since March 5, 2019.  In other words, we now officially have the highest rates in 3 years.