"At a Glance" Local Housing STATS and News 08/13/26

30-Year Fixed: 6.74% ▼ 0.05%  |  15-Year Fixed: 6.27% ▼ 0.01%

Rates finally broke the streak. The 30-year fixed slipped 5 basis points to 6.74% and the 15-year eased one to 6.27%, a five week low after five straight weeks of climbing. Worth knowing if you are quoting a client this afternoon: the 30-year has kept falling today, reading 6.69% in the latest update.

The cause is the inflation print. July consumer prices rose just 0.1%, and shelter alone accounted for roughly two thirds of that increase. Cooler inflation is what lets the Fed consider cutting, and rate cuts are what pull mortgages down. The caveat has not changed: the relief window closes if the Iran conflict pushes energy costs back up.

Lumber is telling a quieter story about what gets built. Prices fell from about $659 per thousand board feet in mid July to roughly $575 now, down about 13%, though still above where the year started. Demand did not collapse. Mills cut output and builders shifted toward multifamily, which uses less wood per unit. The lumber market is describing what builders chose to build, not just how much.

Locally, a five week low is a reason to call the buyers who paused. Not because 6.74% is cheap, but because a client who stopped looking at 6.83% was waiting for a direction change, and this is the first one in over a month. In the Tri-City market the people who win the next dip are the ones who already ran their numbers.

Today’s live board across our five focus cities shows 707 homes a buyer can actually pursue right now, including 43 brand new listings and 116 more coming soon. The full, always-updating ledger lives at harvrealtor.net/live-inventory.

Today’s Live Inventory (buyable now)

• Fremont: 286 available (205 active, 20 new, 59 coming soon)
• Hayward: 200 available (166 active, 15 new, 19 coming soon)
• Milpitas: 99 available (75 active, 1 new, 23 coming soon)
• Newark: 77 available (61 active, 6 new, 10 coming soon)
• Union City: 45 available (39 active, 1 new, 5 coming soon)

Inventory turned around today, up 10 across the five cities. Fremont added 10 and Hayward 4, while Milpitas gave up 3 and Union City 2. The coming soon pipeline rose from 110 to 116 with Fremont carrying 59 of it, so sellers are lining up rather than pulling back. Median asking runs from $849,000 in Hayward to $1,299,939 in Fremont, and Newark stays the fastest at 21 median days on market.

S&P 500: 7,748 ▲ 0.26%  |  DOW: 53,770 ▼ 0.04%  |  NASDAQ: 26,588 ▲ 0.54%

A quiet green day after a mild inflation print. The S&P added 0.26%, the NASDAQ 0.54%, and the Dow was flat.

Cisco is the lesson of the week. It beat expectations, rose 2.86% on August 12 to $123.88, then fell 8.4% the next session to $113.47. Nothing went wrong. The stock had already climbed about 61% this year, so a good quarter was not news, it was the minimum required to justify a price that had already been paid.

That gap between good results and a falling price is the same logic that governs a house that has been sitting. The asking price already contains an expectation. Meeting it does nothing. You only move the number by beating it, which is the entire argument for pricing a listing where the market can be surprised rather than where it is already satisfied.

Elsewhere, Wendy’s jumped 14.70% on reports that Nelson Peltz’s firm is working to take the chain private, the same stock a Reddit campaign pushed up 25% in June.

US 10-Year: 4.68% ▼ 0.02%  |  Gold: $4,395 ▼ 0.57%  |  Silver: $64.75 ▼ 2.48%  |  Brent: $88.98 ▲ 0.08%

Inflation cooled and nobody had to panic. Consumer prices rose just 0.1% in July after falling 0.4% in June, and the annual rate is 3.4%. Shelter rose 0.1% and made up roughly two thirds of the entire monthly increase, a reminder that housing costs are most of what inflation now is.

The yen is sitting right on the tripwire. A dollar buys about 159.4 yen, just under the 160 level where Japanese officials have stepped in before. Japan has been buying yen to hold it up and the U.S. joined a few weeks ago. A weaker yen makes Japanese goods cheaper here and American goods dearer there.

One number deserving more attention: July’s federal deficit hit $432.3 billion in a single month, driven by Medicare costs and interest on the national debt. Interest alone now runs about $1 trillion a year, roughly 14% of the entire federal budget.

Why a REALTOR® cares: a 0.1% inflation print is what lets the Fed cut later this year, and shelter being two thirds of it cuts both ways. The single biggest lever on inflation is the cost of housing, so the path to lower rates runs directly through the market you sell in.

BTC: $63,355 ▲ 0.04%  |  ETH: $1,886 ▲ 0.17%  |  XRP: $1.01 ▲ 0.06%

Three assets, three moves smaller than a fifth of a percent. The news is who showed up: JPMorgan and nearly 40 firms are testing tokenized assets, digital versions of real things like stocks and bonds, in a market already around $38 billion. The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, the plumbing under most American securities settlement, plans to run it as a regular service from October. Balanced against that, someone drained 200,000 XRP, about $200,000, from a cross-chain bridge that never checked whether the deposit arrived. It took 97 minutes.

Disclaimer: The market data, rates, and information provided are for informational purposes only and should not be considered financial advice. Always verify rates and data with your lender or financial advisor before making any decisions.