Market Minute - 4/10/2026
Mahraba and welcome to the Metz Market Minute for the Chrisman Commentary.
Labor was light this week with initial jobless claims coming in just slightly higher than expected. Inflation was the star, with PCE coming out as a Fed favorite metric annualized at 2.8%, but for February which feels like old news. CPI came in today for March with 3.3% annualized, almost 1% for the month and the highest reading in 4 years. That lines up with Fed minutes released showing concerns about inflation and a divided fed talking both rate cuts AND potentially a rate hike being "not off the table".
Rates finally ticked down this week breaking that 5 week streak, and mortgage applications were flat. We saw pending listings increase 4% year over year, while Redfin shows pending sales down 3%. We're up to 723K homes listed across the country, with 34% going through price reductions. Arizona and Florida lead that race, both states showing almost half of their listings with price reductions.
In agency news, there's rumors but no substantiation of potential progress with Vantage with Fannie or Freddie. Fannie released their AI guidelines, which goes into effect in August. It tells the same story as Freddie's guidelines, they're both intentionally vague to give wiggle room but tell lenders: Don't be dumb with our data.
That’s the market in a minute, have a great week.
Extra Content
Some more fun quick stats that didn't make the cut this week:
1.) Average listing is now at $440K.
2.) That average listing is now at 63 days on the market. Considering we're seeing that number of listings increasing another 4% while pending sales went down 3% (per Zillow and Redfin, respectively), you can guess what I'm predicting.
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