This Week's Housing News - Mortgage Rate Whiplash

In this episode, Jennifer talks about the mysterious case of 43,000 Chicago listings disappearing from Zillow overnight, and why similar conflicts between platforms might affect other markets. She also delves into the future of housing with 3D-printed homes and what buyers need to know about their financing. Finally, Jennifer demystifies "mortgage rate whiplash," explaining the true market volatility and offering crucial advice for homebuyers navigating today's complex real estate landscape.

Transcript

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Imagine you're a home buyer in Chicago. You're on Zillow, you've got 50 houses saved, you're looking around, there's a lot for sale. 50,000-ish houses are for sale. You wake up the next morning and 43,000 houses are gone. 43,000 houses disappear from Chicago Zillow overnight. What happened? Yeah, that's one of the stories we're gonna be covering today. So today we're gonna be talking about the case of the disappearing listings, as well as why we may see that in more parts of the country, as well as 3D printed houses. Are they becoming the future? And finally, mortgage rate whiplash. What is going on with mortgage rates? If you're new to this channel or if you like this channel, like, subscribe, drop a comment, it does help. And if you're new and you're like, who are you? I've been a mortgage lender for 19 years. My team is one of the top purchase teams in America. We help people coast to coast achieve the American dream. Give us a call if you have questions or if you want to get pre-approved. 786-933-2077. Let's get into it. Let's start with mortgage rates because that's a quicker, easier story. The disappearing houses is a full saga. So I want to save that for the end so that I can give you guys all the juicy details. Mortgage rates. Literally. Mortgage rates hit a nine-month high. Did you guys see that headline? And then today, mortgage rates hit a two-week low. Here's the deal mortgage headlines get clicks. Everybody knows that. Every news organization knows that. The minute you say mortgage rates jump or mortgage rates drop, click, click, click, click, money in the bank. Now, as someone who actually prices loans on a day-to-day basis, are we seeing volatility in the market? Yeah, of course, of course. Guys, global uncertainty affects mortgage rates. And what we're seeing right now is that whenever we think we have a peace deal with Iran, we see that rates, the pressure on them eases off. They get a little lower. And then if strikes start, if it looks like a peace deal is going sideways, if it looks like the activity in Iran's gonna escalate, we see rates go up. Why? Energy prices and fear of inflation. So if suddenly we have a peace deal with Iran and it holds, well, that takes some of the pressure off of inflation because energy prices are going down. Just one of the many factors, right? If we see that it's escalating or it looks like it's gonna get worse, well, guess what? Then everyone's worried about energy prices going up and they're worried about inflation. It's gonna continue like this until there's some level of stability. And honestly, truly, I don't think there's gonna be any stability in general coming up anytime soon. Not because of Iran, but just because we haven't had any in a very long time. Last year we had the tariffs, which made mortgage rates incredibly volatile. The year before that, we had the presidential election. The year before that, I mean it goes on and on, guys. But here's the thing the market we're in right now is like this. Okay? It's not like 2022. And I think a lot of people, when they see those headlines, especially buyers that maybe looked in 2022 and got scared, 2022 was like this. Here were rates, it just went up. It was bad, right? So it's gonna be a year of volatility. Just make sure the loan officer that you're working with has the ability to renegotiate your rate. Super simple. When you're in contract to buy a house with most of our buyers, we're like, let's lock. We don't know what's gonna happen tomorrow. That's true. No one knows what's gonna happen tomorrow with mortgage rates. If someone says they do, they're lying. You can't know what's happening in Iran and how our government's gonna react to it. Period. You can't. So watch out for those loan officers. You want a loan officer who's gonna lock you and have the ability to renegotiate if rates get lower. So talk to your loan officer about that. Okay, let's move into the 3D printing story because this was super interesting. I recently did a video about data centers on the side of houses. Well, 3D printing is another way that builders are looking at making houses more affordable by building them for less cost on their end. So there's a company called Icon. This company makes the printers. What these 3D printers do, they're not printing the electrical, they're not printing your plumbing, they're printing the walls. Now, I think it's important to note that when I was reading about it, it seemed like a lot of people thought it was concrete walls because it looks very similar to concrete. It's not. It's a patented formula called LavaCrete. So if you're looking at buying one of these houses, please do your research on LavaCrete so that you're an educated and empowered buyer. Now, what's the scoop? So a hundred of these houses have already been built. They're in Wolf Ranch, built by Lenar in Georgetown, Texas. And based on the strength of those sales, Wells Fargo has actually partnered with Lenar on their next 3D printing community. It's important because the first community, normal lenders wouldn't finance. Like if you had called me and said, I mean, even if you call me today, we can't finance 3D printed homes. They're too new, you know, people don't know enough about them. There were concerns about resale, all that stuff that make most lenders go, right? All of that was there. I mean, it's the first hundred houses with a material that no one's long-term tested. Like that holds lending pause. The fact that Wells Fargo is now going to be working with Lenar to finance the next batch is a signal to the industry that these could become mainstream. So something to keep your eye on if you're looking at new construction, you may see more of these communities uh popping up because we're also seeing icons start to sell these machines to other builders. So just make sure you're researching the material, paying attention, and understanding that as I film this, you don't have multiple financing options on it, but you could in the future. So make sure you tell your lender if you're looking at a 3D printed home so that they don't tell you you totally qualify, etc., on something they can't even finance. Let's get into the juicy story because this is the one that, as a home buyer, really, really can affect you. There's a lot of battles going on in the real estate industry right now. There's a lot of class action lawsuits as well. What we're seeing is a true battle royale between Zillow and Compass. Zillow started off as just a little data aggregator. They would sell ads. Basically, around the country, there's these groups called MLS. And what happens is when you're a seller and you list your house, the realtor puts it on MLS, and then that feeds it to all the data aggregators. So Zillow, Homes, Realer.com, all of those get fed by MLS after the real estate agent puts in your information. Okay. So what happened is the Chicago MLS looked at the rules that Zillow had and looked at Compass and said, okay, Zillow, you don't get any of Compass's listings. Well, Compass was once upon a time a little luxury broker, but now they have so many brands, real estate brands, big brands like Century 21. Century 21 is owned by Compass now. They have so many brands underneath them that in many markets they have the bulk of the listings. So Zillow's rules not matching Compass rules in this case ended up with Zillow losing 43,000 listings overnight. Yeah. And so the moral of the story for this for the home buyer is look, this is gonna keep happening because it's not like we have one national MLS across the country. There's little ones everywhere. There's some that have multiple states. And right now, as I film this, there's already a battle about to happen in Tennessee, Southern California, four East Coast states, all between Zillow and Compass, where Zillow could end up not having access to any Compass listings. Okay? As a home buyer, this is important because the last thing I want you to do is go online, go to Zillow because they are the platform most people go to and go, oh, there's nothing for sale. Now in Chicago, a federal judge did make it so that all the listings had to be on Zillow. The outage was only two days. But we don't know what's gonna happen next. So as a home buyer, what I would recommend is look, do you have to pay attention to the lawsuits and the drama? No, just have multiple platforms. You're gonna have to pick two or three. I would probably say if you really like Zillow, keep Zillow. Um, homes.com's been really good about staying out of these fights. They're like Switzerland right now, so homes.com is a good one. And then if you're in an area that's very compass heavy, I would recommend you look at the compass site as well because they're gonna have the pre-listings there. So overall, there's a lot of drama in real estate land right now. We have technology moving forward with 3D printing, we have the big giants in our industry fighting each other all for your eyeballs, is really what it comes down to. Consumer transparency and eyes on the screen. And finally, we've got mortgage rates doing the volatile dance that they've been doing for the last few years with the hyped up headlines just to get clicks. So I hope this video was helpful, and I look forward to talking to you again soon.