Happy Friday! Brian Manning here with the weekly update. Let’s get right to it. Monday this week was Labor Day. Office was closed. I hope everyone had a really wonderful holiday weekend.

Tuesday of this week was a relatively quiet news day. Actually, a lot of this week was pretty quiet. Wednesday this week, we had some Fed info. So, I don’t know if anyone remembers when Alan Greenspan was president of Federal Reserve, nothing was ever announced. No one ever knew what he was going to do with the rates. They never knew if the Fed was going to hike rates, lower rates.

On the news, there was all these surveys about this brief cases and what was the thickness of his brief case and, you know, how thick it was, was dependent on what he was going to do with interest rates. And the world is so different now. Now, the Federal Reserve has a mole. No one knows who this is. The mole leaks its information to the Wall Street Journal.

We have a Fed meeting coming up here at the end of September, but it’s already been leaked to The Wall Street Journal. The Federal Reserve is going to hike rates three quarters of a percent at this September meeting, which is 75 basis points. I think why they do this is because when they get this information out to the marketplace, it lets everybody digest it. It lets markets react instead of just having giant swings the day of the Fed meeting and the announcement there, it’s getting the info out. So just plan on it. 75 basis point rate hike. That’s what you’re going to see here at the end of September.

I think what’s really important to note is that if you have a HELOC right now, what’s called the Wall Street Journal prime rate, that’s the interest rate that HELOCs are based off of was that 5.5%. So, if you have a HELOC and you’ve used this for anything, buying investment properties, home remodeling, etcetera. At the end of September, Federal Reserve hikes their rates three quarters of a percent. That takes your HELOC rate and moves it to six and a quarter.

Now… Federal Reserve is going to meet again in November. Who knows what they’re going to do based on the info they’re putting out there right now? You’re going to see another rate hike in November. It could be half a percent, could be three quarters of a percent in November as well. And you have a HELOC and they raised three quarters of a percent in November, That puts your HELOC rate at 7%. So, keep that in mind. You know, keep your HELOC within close reach. Pay attention to where your payments are at. Pay attention to where rates are at. If you’re not sure how to calculate, give me a call. I’ll walk through it with you. I’ll help you anticipate what your payments are going to do on your HELOC.

But certainly, seeing a HELOC rate of 7% is going to be impactful on any of the money that you have drawn out. Also Wednesday this week, we’ve had Core Logic. Core Logic gives us feedback on home appreciation. This is for the month of July. On a year-over-year basis, home appreciation was up 16%. It’s still incredible. It’s ridiculous. These numbers are staggering. Yes, we’ve seen it come down off as high. The high was at 20%. We’ve been talking about this. These numbers have to come down. 20% was not sustainable. Even 16% is not sustainable.

Core Logic predicts going forward that home appreciation will be at 4%. You know, that’s pretty amazing This is not a collapse in housing. If you see home appreciation work its way down from 20% per year and come down to 4% per year, that is not a collapse in housing. Just seeing a decrease in appreciation is very different than a decline or going negative. So, you got to watch the media, be careful what you’re paying attention to, because… seeing home appreciation come down is really good to see. Again, these numbers weren’t sustainable, but 4% going forward, getting into the next couple of years still makes home ownership worthwhile when you’re looking at buying versus renting. Thursday this week, we had Jerome Powell on the news just doing an open interview, you know, just talking about what they’re going to do for Fed rate hikes and going forward. We always have to watch this carefully, you know. And certainly, Jerome Powell’s tone in these interviews is very important because… if Jerome sounds scared in these interviews and it makes it look like they don’t know what they’re doing, then investors are going to freak out. That’s going to have a very significant negative impact on the market.

But… in his interviews that he can come across as being confident and knowing what they’re wanting to do and having a clear path going forward to fight inflation, then markets will have more confidence in that. So, we got to keep a close eye on those interviews because it’s a little wishy washy right now. Also Thursday this week, we had the ECB, that’s the European Central bank. That’s their version of the Federal Reserve. They hike rates by 75 basis points. It’s a little more than expected. You know, both the ECB and the Federal Reserve, both have a lot of heavy lifting to do going forward. There’s a lot of inflation to combat right now. They definitely have a tough job going forward, but that was what the ECB did today.

Friday this week was pretty quiet news day, not much to report there. I’m around all weekend. If you have any questions, let me know. Call me on my cell phone, text me, if you need assistance with going through a pre-approval process. You want to go through our strategic buyer consultation, give me a call, shoot me a text, I’d love to help you. Happy Friday. Have a great day.

-Brian Manning
303-500-3839
brianm@rate.com