Portland Mortgage Market Update — September 12, 2025

This week was STACKED! It was a rare week where we had both jobs and inflation reports dropping with the potential to move markets significantly. And yet, nothing really happened rate-wise. Sure there was some intra-day movement, but as of writing we are about even with where we started the week. That's fine by me considering the steady march downward rates have been taking the past two weeks.

The QCEW report highlighted the BLS inaccuracies. The Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages report is basically an audit of the BLS previous monthly jobs reports. To issue its monthly reports, the BLS has select companies complete a survey about their hiring and employment for the past month. The survey is supposed to be mandatory, but not all companies complete it in time, so the BLS "imputes" (guesses) that data to fill in the gaps. The QCEW comes along each quarter and reassesses the data gained from the surveys, because now they are all in. The QCEW that dropped this week is for the quarter ending in March, and it showed those reports were overestimating the labor market by about 911K jobs. This is kind of a big deal, because if the Fed had this data back then we would likely have had some rate cuts happening sooner which would have been nice for the Summer busy season.

The PPI and CPI also dropped this week, with little impact. The PPI came in much lower than expected and the CPI came in pretty much right where the market was thinking it would, showing the impact of Tariffs may be finally trickling down to the consumer level. Regardless, the market largely ignored both with its eyes set on next week's Fed meeting. Currently, there is a 92.4% chance for a 25 basis point cut (.25%) and a 7.6% chance for a 50 basis point cut. The 25 point cut is already priced into current mortgage rates, so we will be monitoring the Fed's statements closely to deduce how they plan to move going forward. If they indicate more rate cuts are coming in the next few meetings (or cut by 50 bps) mortgage rates will drop. If they imply this one cut is enough and will go back to their "wait and see" policy, we could see rates spike after the meeting. Personally, my money is on the latter option happening.

Bottom line- rates are really good right now compared to where we have been the past year, and now is the time to hit the ground running. I am around all weekend so feel free to reach out with any questions or if there is anything I can do to help!