"At a Glance" Local Housing STATS and News 08/17/26

30-Year Fixed: 6.71% ▲ 0.02%  |  15-Year Fixed: 6.29% ▲ 0.03%

Rates gave a little back. The 30-year fixed rose 2 basis points to 6.71% and the 15-year added 3 to 6.29%, ending a two day slide. The reason is in the Economy section: the ten year yield climbed 5 basis points and Brent crude rose 1.67%, so both of the forces that drove Friday’s four week low reversed over the weekend.

Two national datapoints landed today, and together they describe a market tilting toward buyers. High prices and high rates pushed 967,000 would-be buyers to the sidelines in July, and sellers now outnumber buyers by 51%. When that many people step back, the buyers who remain gain leverage they have not had in years. The steepest price drops are in Miami and Houston, both markets that built aggressively into the boom.

Flipper confidence hit a record low, and the second order effect is the interesting part. Only 26% of investors who buy and renovate single-family homes think conditions are better than a year ago, down from 35% last quarter, while 45% say the market has gotten worse. Fewer flips means fewer renovated homes reaching the market, which thins the move-in-ready supply a certain kind of buyer wants and props up prices and rents on whatever is left.

For the Tri-City market, the gap between the national story and the local one is the whole point. Our board is not Miami or Houston. Fremont’s median asking price is still near $1.3 million and the median listing goes pending in 25 days. When a client arrives quoting a national headline about a buyer’s market, the honest answer is that the leverage is real in some places and thin here, and knowing the difference is the job.

Today’s live board across our five focus cities shows 721 homes a buyer can pursue right now, including 60 brand new listings and 120 more coming soon. The full, always-updating ledger lives at harvrealtor.net/live-inventory.

Today’s Live Inventory (buyable now)

• Fremont: 288 available (201 active, 26 new, 59 coming soon)
• Hayward: 198 available (160 active, 18 new, 20 coming soon)
• Milpitas: 106 available (78 active, 3 new, 25 coming soon)
• Newark: 79 available (60 active, 10 new, 9 coming soon)
• Union City: 50 available (40 active, 3 new, 7 coming soon)

The total held essentially flat, down 1 from Friday, but it churned underneath. Sixty brand new listings arrived while Hayward gave up 6 and Fremont 2, and Milpitas and Union City each added 3. A flat total carrying that much new supply means homes are selling about as fast as they arrive, which is a healthier market than the flat number suggests. Median asking runs from $848,000 in Hayward to $1,298,944 in Fremont, and Newark stays quickest at 24 median days on market.

US 10-Year: 4.68% ▲ 0.05%  |  Gold: $4,384 ▲ 0.30%  |  Silver: $65.48 ▲ 1.01%  |  Brent: $88.52 ▲ 1.67%

The dollar is the quiet story. It slid to its weakest point since May, with the dollar index down 0.4% Friday, because Americans are spending less. Softer spending gives the Fed less reason to raise rates, and a currency with less rate support drifts. A weaker dollar makes imports dearer, worth remembering the next time an appliance or a light fixture quotes higher than it did in spring.

Electric vehicles are getting more expensive on both ends, and the mechanism is worth understanding because it repeats everywhere. A new EV averaged $56,126 in July, up 1.6% year over year, while incentives on them fell to $6,626, down 24.3%, now that the $7,500 federal credit is gone. Used EVs turned up too, and sharply.

Remove $7,500 of help from the new side and the used side gets bid up, because the cheaper substitute suddenly looks better. Housing policy works exactly the same way, which is why every proposal to help buyers deserves the same question: who ends up capturing the help, the buyer or the seller?

Two corrections to this morning’s newsletter. It printed the 10-Year at 4.68% and called it unchanged; the Treasury’s daily curve has it up 5 basis points from 4.63%. It also reported Brent at $88.76 and up 0.35%; the actual settlement was $88.52, up 1.67%. A rising ten year and pricier oil are precisely why mortgage rates ticked back up.

Gold is at $4,384 and silver jumped to $65.48. One note for anyone comparing sources: the newsletter quoted gold at $4,460 as of 4 PM Friday. That is not a contradiction but a different moment, since gold ran up during Friday’s session and has eased back this morning.

S&P 500: 7,785 ▼ 0.17%  |  DOW: 53,732 ▼ 0.20%  |  NASDAQ: 26,729 ▼ 0.28%

A soft finish to last week, with all three indexes giving back a fraction. Small moves in the same direction is what a market with nothing new to react to looks like.

Anthropic put a number on the AI spending boom: Q2 revenue of $11.5 billion, a 14 times increase year over year, as businesses pay for Claude to handle coding and daily work. It is still private and could go public as early as this year.

Elsewhere, Lockheed rose 1.78% on a new $2 million interceptor built to stop shooting down cheap drones with the priciest missiles in the arsenal, Alibaba added 1.35% after crossing 3 billion downloads of its free Qwen models, and Nintendo climbed 7% in Tokyo on Pokémon sales.

BTC: $63,548 ▲ 0.80%  |  ETH: $1,899 ▲ 0.96%  |  XRP: $1.00 ▼ 0.01%

A modestly green morning. The week’s real lesson is about where risk actually sits: wallet makers SafePal and Trezor both leaked customer records, 53,487 of them, including names, home addresses and order details. The blockchain was not breached. The companies holding the customer list were. That parallel lands directly on our business, because we hold client files full of addresses, financial details and move dates. The customer list is always the softest target. Separately, a crypto firm 38% owned by an entity tied to Trump and his family received a conditional national bank charter, which would let it issue stablecoins directly.

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.