 Today, I want to talk about mortgage rates. I want to talk about the real estate market prices, etc. There's been a lot happening. I've been gone for the last week. I've been keeping up with it. So it's very interesting. Let's dive in here. Today, we're looking at 6.8% on the 30-year fix. This is, you know, for people with 740 credit scores or better. And this is much higher, much higher than where we were. We were, of course, it got up above 7s, you know, back, you know, early November jumped into the 7s. But we've come down, but we're up a good, well, it bottomed out at 5.99. It's where it actually bottomed out. Let's see where that was. 5.99. It's so little. I can't even, it was only for one day a couple of weeks ago. We bottomed out at 5.99. And now we're back up to 6.8. That is, let's just say, 80 basis points, 0.8%, which essentially knocks off, you know, a little less than 10% purchasing power on average from buyers. So that's knocked a real bite out of our buyer pool. But, you know, the way that I see this thing happening and the way that I see this playing out is that we're going to, it's going to be a little bumpy right here, you know, but what we're seeing in the argument is, is that the trend is down. We're going to see, you know, reports like CPI reports come out. We had kind of a somewhat of a, you know, not the greatest CPI report here recently. So the annual inflation report in the US slowed slightly to 6.4 in January 2023 from 6.5 in December. So it was down 1 tenth of a percent. Less than the market forecast of 6.2. So the market was expecting 6.2 and we went to 6.4. Okay. This is annual inflation rate. Still, it's the lowest reading since October 2021, with energy prices rising 8.7%. Food costs went up 10.1%. And although inflation has shown signs of peaking at 9.1 in June of last year, it remains more than three times above the Fed's target of 2%. Okay. And a point to a broad-based advance on general price level, particularly services and housing, services and housing, right? And so right here is the CPI. And this is each month right here. And the argument right now is that next month we're going to have a little more, we're going to have more data. Well, in the March 14th report, it's expected to be really great data. Okay. The April report is expected to be not so good because what the mortgage people are doing is, is they're comparing it to last year and they're looking at year-over-year numbers. And what everybody is gearing up for, right? And the report that everybody is basically agreeing that this is going to be a real inflection point with mortgage rates. And the 10-year treasury is going to be that May 10th number. That May 10th number is expected, okay? It's forecasted to be incredible year-over-year. And that's when a lot of people in the mortgage industry are calling for this, this inflection point in mortgage rates to really kind of turn the corner, right? So a little bumpy here with inflation, CPI numbers, mortgage rates, 10-year treasuries, which is to be expected. It's not just going to go, you know, up as fast as it went and then just come down and then just settle. It's not, it's going to be a little bumpy here. And that's where we're going to see a lot of these, you know, peaks. Like we saw, for example, the, the mortgage application rush that we saw back in early January, we saw that mortgage application rush, which again, the rush didn't rise up to levels that, you know, really was, you know, it was more of an indication that buyers are still there. It wasn't like, okay, buyers are back and, you know, the entire market is turning around. That wasn't what that was. That was just an indication, hey, you know, buyers are still there as interest rates do ease off. So it's going to be real interesting to see what that report, what happens in that May report. And we're looking at April 14th, I mean, March 14th, April 12th. We're looking at those two reports to kind of see how things play out. Now, you see right here, the 10-year treasury, okay, the 10-year treasury basically rose with interest rates. That's what pushes interest rates up, mortgage rates. And you can see around a little after February 1st, you know, things, this is a year, this is a year of the 10-year treasury. And we can see that it, it went down and now we see that it's coming back up. And it's at 3.8 right now. All right. And that's what we need to see come back down for mortgage rates to start easing. Okay. So this is the number that we really want to pay attention to here, the 10-year treasury. All right. If we look here, we can see mortgage rates, right? I can pull this back and I can, I can go back all the way to 1972 with mortgage rates, right? And then I can zoom all the way in is all the way into basically this, this today. But you can see that, that we, that we were coming down, you know, and then it was around February 1st, February 2nd, February 3rd when things started to come back up. Now, we, as real estate agents, we all know that we've been seeing multiple offers. Now that's eased off since interest rates have come back up and demand has come back down just a tad. But we did see that little brief moment where things are still, now a lot of you guys are going to probably put in the comments right now that you're still seeing multiple offers on things. Yeah. And that's very interesting. As I dive into some of the data here on prices, okay? So I want to show you guys some of this stuff right here, okay? So this is, this is something that I think we all need to really pay attention to. This is prices, okay, nationally, okay? This is from the Redfin News Data Center. This is something that you can go and play around with. This is going to be very interesting, okay? The blue line here is 2023. And you see it's kind of leveling off. But in my opinion, there's no way that this is going to catch up to last year and start increasing to stay above last year's numbers. So we're going to see an intersection of these two lines, which means we're going to go negative year over here. As we go negative year over here, we're going to see the media come out with these crazy negative headlines. And it's going to show some year over year negative prices. And the question is, is that going to create fear in the market or is it going to create a situation where people want to get in because they feel like, okay, things are down. Let's get in the market. Even though prices, prices could say identical to what they are right now, okay, identical, but then we're still going to see those articles, even if prices stay exactly where they are right this second. And so is it going to create fear where people, you know, say, oh God, or is it going to create a situation where people say, oh, it's down. Let's get in. It's going to be real interesting to see because as we see the negative articles come out and prices year over year go negative, we're also going to see interest rates come down, mortgage rates come down. It's going to kind of be a little trifecta here where, you know, when we see that May 10th number and we start to see interest rates ease off, which is what a lot of people are arguing is going to happen, we're also going to see huge year over year price declines. And so it's going to be, you know, just incredibly interesting. Now, now let's dive into, let's just say Miami. You can go here and play around with this, but look at Miami. Okay, we're nowhere near negative year over year price decreases. And who knows, we may not see negative year over year price increases according to this chart. Okay, so everything is super local. Let's look at Phoenix. If you look at Phoenix, we're already negative year over year. We're 4%, we're 5% negative year over year prices in Phoenix right now as we speak. Okay, let's look at San Diego. Okay, we were negative and now we intersected to positive. That will come back negative because in my opinion, there's no way that prices are going to keep up with this surge in prices that we saw last year. This is going to come back negative, but lookie here. So it's just, it's so localized, you know, compared to just national numbers. So we want to pay attention to national numbers, but we also want to pay attention to our local numbers. And our local numbers are what is most important to our clients. Okay, you know, for me, I don't want to go out here and start telling my clients what's happening nationally because it means nothing to my clients whatsoever. What I want to do is I want to pay attention to my local numbers. I want to do my own research through MLS. I want to look at Redfin. I want to look at all the different places that give me local real estate stats and data. And I want to analyze that data frequently. And I want to make sure that I have my clients through my weekly emails or wherever I distribute that information to my clients. I want to make sure that they're fully updated on not only the data, okay, that you have collected and researched and analyzed, but also your opinions on the data, what you think about it, not what you think is going to happen, not predicting the market, but just kind of giving your clients insights on what the buyers locally are saying, what you're seeing in the market, all the stats so that they can feel like, not even feel like you are keeping them very tippity top of the market in terms of keeping them updated, where they feel like that you're keeping them updated on the market more than anybody else, any other real estate agent. That's where you're going to start to really win these clients over. And so it's just somebody said Pittsburgh, right? So let's dive into Pittsburgh and just see really quickly before we move on to something else. Let's see. Pittsburgh, okay, let's see where we are. Okay, so we're already negative year over year. And even look last year. Last year, we even went negative for a second in Pittsburgh back in early February, late January, we went negative year over year last year, 1%. And then up here, we went negative 1% for a second. And then actually, we went negative last November, we've been negative, and then we came back positive for a second. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, we've been negative since November in Pittsburgh. So yeah, what we're negative price year over year prices is so localized. So here's the date to really be looking for is May 10th, right? We also want to look at March 14th, April 12 CPI numbers, really pay attention to inflation and what's happening there. It's going to be a little bumpy. We're going to get some data that's not exactly 100% favorable. That's why we're seeing higher mortgage rates right now currently. But we are going to see the trend down and it will eventually get to a place where we find that floor on real estate prices and everything starts to improve. So that's your update on mortgage rates prices. I'll have more for you throughout the week. So stay tuned for that.