Mortgage Rates Hold Steady Near 3-Month Lows

Mortgage rates continued to hold in the narrow range where they’ve existed for all of 2020 thus far, near their lowest levels in three months. Steady retail sales and encouraging home construction data gave rates a nudge late last week, but news of a coronavirus outbreak prompted investors to seek out safer assets, erasing those gains.

Perhaps surprisingly, major geopolitical developments over the past month – stories that dictated most of mortgage rates’ movements through 2019 – have failed to let rates loose in any meaningful way. Inflation is running below target and the Federal Reserve appears unlikely to raise the federal funds rate in the near future, so upward pressure on mortgage rates is limited for the time being.

With a shortage of market-moving data on tap, and barring a monumental development on the trade front, this minimal upward pressure on rates is unlikely to strengthen in the coming days.

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