I think most of us have heard of the friend or family member that applied for a mortgage typically or maybe a car or credit card and then they were bombarded by telemarketers. What happens actually is entirely legal.

The Credit Bureau's Transunion, Equifax and Experian are allowed to sell their records of you as a consumer to mortgage lenders to credit card providers, to auto loan companies and they use that data of course, as leads to try to sell products to you.

Mortgage applications are down year to date anywhere from 30 to 40% based on recent numbers that I've seen, meaning mortgage companies volume is down by about half or just a little less and so many of them are desperate to stay busy.

I'm thankful and my team is so grateful that we are down about 10% this year. Thanks to the wonderful, amazing partners that we work with realtor partners, past clients, family, etc. But it's tough times out there considering rates have gone up and inventory is so low.

There just isn't enough property to go around so mortgage companies are more desperate than ever to get business. They buy these leads!

I had a client this week get called 73 times in one day, which is obscene.

Now, the most sad part is by time the client reaches out to me for a pre approval, it's too late for them to protect themselves from getting harassed by these companies. You can do something called optoutprescreen.com which opts you out from prescreened credit offers but it takes about 5 to 7 days to go into effect.

So the reason I'm sharing this is if you have family, friends, clients, et cetera that are considering purchasing a home or doing a credit transaction soon or for yourself, just to protect for the future. It's a very quick and easy process. You go to the website listed in the email and you are protected for five years from being harassed like my poor dear client was this last week.

The other thing I want to talk about is a little bit different angle of something I've been discussing recently.

What happens when rates hit 6%?

Well, a fun fact (and I think it's fun because I'm a data nerd) is every half percent that rates go down, about 3 million households become eligible or qualified to purchase a home.

That's how sensitive affordability is these days. We are under supplied in housing by about half. We have a three month supply of housing.

Meaning if not a single new home hit the market, we would run out of listings in, in about 3.4 months. At least that's through September.

That's right. Now, if rates drop, basically 2% from where they are at right now, technically 12 million households become eligible to purchase a home.

And as of right now, we're only on pace to sell about 4 million house houses per year nationwide. So the industry, the market, as we know, it would just be toppled theoretically if rates drop, if and when,  that it's quite likely that rates will go down. I don't think we'll see 3%.

But maybe high fives, mid to low sixes is pretty likely.

And so with a relatively high degree of certainty, we can know what that future will look like. So, if, if you know someone that's on the fence, perhaps this is a word to the wise, a cautionary tale of what could happen if they wait too long.

Why not otherwise buy the house now with less competition and then if rates do go down, then you can refinance and at that point. There'll be so much competition driving up housing values. At that time, you would have so much equity in your home that you could easily refinance, you could probably get rid of PMI if you had it and take advantage of all those opportunities.

So I hope this is beneficial. I hope you have an amazing rest of your weekend. And as always, shoot me a text if you have any questions 414-488-0438.