Jobs and the Market

You may have heard about the report the Labor department sent out a while back about Job growth. Lets just say it did not exactly raise much hope last month, BUT, it did raise something else…

The long story short is that for the past three months the government has lowered its job growth estimations, and September did not show any growth in job positions either. In fact According to these reports and a Washington Post article, it only added 142,000 positions which is far less then what analysts had expected. Since 2013, the job market had been growing at an average pace of 200,000+ jobs per month. That’s a fairly substantial gap.

You can read the full article here..
www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/10/02/economy-expected-to-add-200000-jobs-in-september

While you may be interested to read further on the numbers of jobless Americans, I say don’t dwell on it because the fact is, while job growth may not have changed dramatically this month, those numbers also have NOT GONE DOWN! Thats an important point. In fact its great!

And this is where that report raised something else, hope for home buyers! The report drove down mortgage rates! A 30-year average fixed-rate mortgage dropped to 3.76 % while last year it was 4.19%. A month ago an average fixed-rate mortgage was 3.85 %. According to the Washington Post this is the lowest it has been in 6 months!

To read about the drop in other mortgage rates in the Washington Post article go here…
www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/where-we-live/wp/2015/10/08/fixed-mortgage-rates-tumble-to-lowest-levels-in-six-months

With this drop in mortgage rates also came a big spike in mortgage applications, and buyers who previously couldn’t quite qualify before now have their letters in hand and on the move to purchase. The outcome here: fairly steady pace of of fall buyers.