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Didier Malagies • Jun 24, 2024
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Mortgage rates have leveled off in the past week, according to data on HousingWire‘s Mortgage Rates Center . The average 30-year rate for conforming loans sat at 7.08% on Tuesday, unchanged from one week ago, while the 15-year rate rose 1 basis point to 6.63% during the week. There has been considerable downward movement in rates over the past few months after the 30-year rate peaked at 7.58% in early May. This has been sparked by a recent decline in the 10-year Treasury yield, a narrowing of the spread between the 30-year rate and the 10-year yield, and consistency from the Federal Reserve on the policy front. HousingWire Lead Analyst Logan Mohtashami indicated that he does not expect much short-term movement in rates. He pointed to recent comments from Fed Governor Michelle Bowman, who does not anticipate any cuts this year to benchmark rates. Bowman is not the only policymaker who shares this view. Last week, 11 of 19 Fed officials predicted one cut or fewer in 2024, a dramatic change from the 10 of 19 officials who anticipated three cuts in March. Mohtashami noted that the new-home sales report to be released Wednesday, as well as the Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) inflation report that comes out Friday, could influence rates this week. Last week, Mohtashami wrote that mortgage application data is signaling increased demand. Purchase loan applications, in particular, saw positive growth during consecutive weeks for the first time since mid-March. But applications remain down since the start of the year, Mohtashami noted. “This suggests that we’re not experiencing real mortgage demand growth at high rates and the fluctuations we see in the data are merely rebounds from low levels,“ he wrote. Mike Simonsen, president of Altos Research , wrote earlier this week that “higher for longer” mortgage rates have taken a toll on home sales. Altos reported that 67,000 new contracts for single-family home transactions were started during the past week, down 2.7% from the prior week and 3.3% than the same time last year. “The takeaway from the pending sales data is that any growth in sales volume we might have seen early in the year is gone,“ Simonsen wrote. “This is a function of mortgage rates staying in the 7s. There’s just no incentive for buyers to jump now. Unless and until mortgage rates drop, we’re in this holding pattern.“ But Altos data also shows that a large share of homes (36.9%) include cuts to the original list price, a sign that inventory is rising and sellers are having a more difficult time locating a buyer. Simonsen noted that markets on Florida’s Gulf Coast, as well as pandemic-era boomtowns in the West such as Austin, Phoenix and Denver, have seen price cuts become more common of late. “You have elements like property taxes and insurance costs that are way up, so you have a lot more sellers,“ Simonsen wrote.
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The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is seeking to provide more support to military veterans who want to age in place in their current homes. This includes exploration of the smart-home technology sector, according to reporting at the Federal News Network. Smart home tech, including wearable devices like smart watches, could help flag instances when an older veteran living independently is having some kind of medical emergency. But Joseph Ronzio, the VA’s deputy chief health technology officer, added that the department wants to ensure that veterans are involved in who has access to their data. “Everyone nowadays has some smartness in their home, whether it’s a speaker, whether it’s light switches, whether it’s different types of lights or other physical devices — cameras, motion detectors that leave a digital service,” Ronzio explained at the Advanced Technology Academic Research Center (ATARC)’s DevSecOps Summit during a panel moderated by the Federal News Network. “Most of the time we’re not able to access that digital footprint because it’s kept in a cloud service or a cloud system, and that’s masking to us what’s going on,” he said. “We’ve been able to implement some technologies that have actually been able to unmask it, and then evaluate what is the best kind of [health impact] and then start detecting where there’s problems.” Technology-focused personnel at the VA view the situation in personal terms. Chief health technology officer Craig Luigart, himself a disabled veteran, feels his smart watch has saved him “multiple times,” according to Ronzio. It has alerted his family members when he has had a medical emergency, and the department is aware of the aging-in-place applications these tools can offer. “As we look more and more towards our veteran population who are aging in place and look at the need for skilled nursing beds and skilled nursing facilities over the long haul, or nursing homes, there’s definitely a need for this capability to be refined and developed,” Ronzio explained. The VA already helps to provide home modifications with an eye toward increasing accessibility for later-life challenges. It is now providing senior veterans with certain smart-home tech to better enable their aging in place, Ronzio explained. “We are providing those sensors and those technologies,” he said. ”Now we just have to peel the onion on this and start building better algorithms to detect and share that data with caregivers — whether that’s a spouse, whether that’s a child, whether it’s a loved one, whether it’s a friend of the family.” Recently, technology is taking up more of the conversation around aging in place, particularly as smart-home technology has become more prevalent through U.S. tech giants like Amazon , Apple and Google , and as more seniors continue to prefer aging in place. Recent surveys conducted in 2023 and 2024 by U.S. News & World Report found that 93% of respondents view aging in place as an “important goal.” The respondents also listed specific technologies as most helpful toward an aging-in-place goal. These were focused primarily on medical- or health-related mobile apps; service-related apps like food and grocery delivery; wearable medical or health trackers; assistive smart-home technologies like Google Home or Amazon Alexa devices; hearing assistance devices; and medical alert systems and devices like LifeAlert. Research data from 2023 also found that for seniors who may be on the fence about remaining in their homes, smart tech tools could help ease such concerns.
