Daily Dose of Real Estate for May 21

A “bond bloodbath” was declared as the 30-year Treasury hit 5.19% – its highest since June 2007 – as the trifecta of surging inflation, a Fed still threatening to “look through” it, and a tsunami of new debt nobody in Washington seems inclined to address before the next election (problem solved). MND’s top-tier 30-year fixed touched 6.75% Tuesday before fully unwinding Wednesday on peace-talk headlines. The April FOMC minutes – Powell’s last – revealed a majority of officials would consider hiking if inflation stays above 2%, with three regional presidents formally dissenting against the statement’s residual easing bias – incoming Chair Kevin Warsh has his work cut out for him. The House passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act 396-13 (the 13 holdouts being Republicans loyal to Trump’s build-to-rent forced-sale demand). The White House released two financial-system Executive Orders – never mention housing – directly touching BSA underwriting data, fintech charters, and Fed master accounts for non-banks. Two Harbors postponed its CCM merger vote to May 28 after ISS recommended voting against, a federal court denied the stockholder TRO, and KBW concluded CrossCountry will have to raise its bid – for good measure, UWM reiterated that its competing offer remains “superior.” Rocket and Redfin rolled out a joint $20,000 affordability sweetener for buyers, the CFPB quietly deleted every newsroom item published before February 2025, and MF1 Capital priced a $734 million inaugural multifamily CMBS conduit – a reminder that, somewhere beneath the bond carnage, capital is still finding apartments.

Let’s get you caught up and out the door in 3 minutes. Tim

RESIDENTIAL REAL ESTATE MARKETS

• Redfin: Pending home sales rose 9.6% year over year in the four weeks ending May 10, the highest level since September 2022. Mortgage-purchase applications were up 4% week over week and pending sales rose in every major U.S. metro except Houston, Detroit, and Seattle.
• Realtor.com weekly: median list prices down 2.2% year over year as price-cut share holds near 36%.HousingWire’s housing-liquidity analysis frames the story as pricing realism — rather than weakness — clearing inventory faster, with buyers more payment-sensitive and location-sensitive than at any point in the cycle.
• Redfin economist Chen Zhao: weekly average 30-year fixed at 6.68% Monday — highest in ten months — and stagflation worries are reshaping rate-cut expectations. Zhao notes the longer the war in Iran drags on, the larger the impact on the U.S. economy and housing market is likely to be.
• NAHB Remodelers releases its 2026 Drivers of Remodeling Spending dataset, covering 26,000+ ZIP codes — owner-occupied homes, share of homes with improvements, spending per improvement, age of housing stock, owner demographics. With existing-home turnover stuck near 4 million SAAR and roughly two-thirds of mortgages locked in below 5%, remodeling activity is the structural pressure-release valve and the data tool is timely.
• NAR & the bipartisan Congressional Real Estate Caucus cheer the House’s amended ROAD to Housing Act,with NAR EVP Shannon McGahn calling the 396-13 vote “a meaningful and bipartisan step toward addressing America’s housing affordability crisis.”

MORTGAGE MARKETS

• Mortgage News Daily: 30-year fixed fully recovers Tuesday’s spike on US–Iran peace news. Top-tier rates dropped sharply Wednesday after newswires shortly after 10:00 a.m. ET pointed to a near-final draft of a peace agreement; oil prices fell sharply and Treasury yields followed, and the average lender ended the day below Monday’s close.
• MBA Weekly Survey (May 20): applications -2.3% for the week ending May 15; 30-year contract rate up 9 bps to 6.73% — highest in seven weeks. Purchase apps fell 4.1% and refis edged down 0.1%; MBA’s Joel Kan cites “ongoing concerns around inflation from higher fuel costs combined with rising concerns over global public debt.”
• Tuesday’s Mortgage News Daily piece “Mortgage Rates Jump Again, Now up 0.75% Since Start of The War” marked the fastest 10-day rate move since late 2024, with Fannie/Freddie MBS purchase demand the only thing keeping the spread to Treasuries from widening further.
• Two Harbors adjourns CCM vote to May 28 after ISS recommends “against”. A Maryland federal court denied stockholder George Assad’s request for a temporary restraining order; KBW analysts said the vote count to-date “suggests CrossCountry will have to raise its bid.”
• UWM doubles down post-adjournment, calling the CCM deal “inferior” and urging the Two Harbors board to engage. A UWM statement Tuesday afternoon said engagement “is the only path to maximizing value for Two stockholders”; CrossCountry declined to comment.
• MF1 Capital prices $734.2 million inaugural fixed-rate multifamily CMBS conduit (JPMF1 2026-FX1).Seventeen five-year loans backed by 24 stabilized properties across 12 states; J.P. Morgan is sole bookrunner with pricing expected on or about May 21 and settlement around June 10.

REGULATORY & POLICY DEVELOPMENTS

• House Financial Services passes 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act 396-13 on Wednesday, sending it back to the Senate. Chairman French Hill (R-AR) and Ranking Member Maxine Waters (D-CA) negotiated out the Senate’s seven-year build-to-rent forced-sale rule while keeping the 350-home purchase ban on large institutional investors.
• Trump EO #1 (May 19): White House fact sheet on “Restoring Integrity to America’s Financial System”.Directs Treasury to issue an advisory identifying red flags for payroll-tax evasion, off-the-books wage payments, structuring, labor trafficking, and ITIN-based account openings without verified legal presence — and to propose changes to Bank Secrecy Act regulations strengthening customer due diligence. Mortgage and consumer-credit underwriting implications follow directly from the “obscuring risk across the financial system” framing in the fact sheet.
• Trump EO #2 (May 19): White House fact sheet on “Integrating Financial Technology Innovation into Regulatory Frameworks”. Sets a 90-day clock for federal financial regulators to identify rules, guidance, no-action letters, and supervisory practices that “unduly impede fintech firms” from partnering with depository institutions and to streamline charter, deposit-insurance, and licensing applications; the Fed is asked to evaluate Reserve Bank master-account access for uninsured depositories and non-bank fintechs within 120 days. ICBA’sRebeca Romero Rainey: “Policymakers must recognize the significant gaps in regulation, supervision, and resolution between banks and nonbanks.”
• FOMC minutes (April 28-29) released Wednesday show a hawkish tilt going into the Warsh era. A majority of participants said tightening “would likely become appropriate” if inflation persists above 2%, and “many” would have preferred to drop the easing bias from the statement entirely; Hammack, Kashkari, and Logan dissented on that point.
• CFPB removes all newsroom items published before February 2025 from its public website on May 19. The deletion, disclosed via a one-line note atop the agency’s newsroom page, comes as the OMB-directed shrinkage and RIF litigation continue to play out at the bureau.

ECONOMIC NEWS

• Wolf Street: “Bond bloodbath” worsens as inflation, a lax Fed, and a flood of new debt converge. The 30-year Treasury closed Tuesday at 5.19% — highest since June 2007 — with a 156-bp spread now opened between the 30-year yield and the EFFR, and MND’s top-tier 30-year fixed at 6.75%. Richter argues the Fed needs to hike, not “look through” inflation, to soothe yields and mortgage rates.
• 10-year Treasury at 4.67%, a 16-month high. CNN frames the move as a bond-market rout driven by inflation worries tied to the Iran war and concerns about unsustainable federal finances, with longer-dated yields the principal mortgage-rate transmission channel.
• FXStreet: FOMC minutes confirm what bond traders already priced in — rate-hike scenarios are back on the table. Participants flagged elevated oil prices and tariffs as potentially embedding inflation pressures more deeply across the broader economy, materially complicating the policy path going into Warsh’s first meeting June 16-17.
• Fed Governor Stephen Miran submitted his resignation last week, opening a board seat ahead of Warsh’s first FOMC. Kraken notes the administration will now look to nominate a replacement as the central bank works through the data corridor (April PCE and Q1 GDP second print May 28; May NFP June 5) between Powell’s exit and Warsh’s first meeting.
• Warsh sworn in May 15 as the 17th Fed Chair on a 54-45 Senate vote — the closest confirmation in the modern era. Heygotrade notes markets read his trimmed-mean inflation preference as ambiguous on rates and hawkish on balance-sheet runoff; options pricing reflects ~30% probability of a hike by Q1 2027 per the Desk Survey referenced in the April 28-29 minutes.

COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE MARKETS (INCLUDING MULTIFAMILY)

• CRE News: MF1 Capital’s $734.2M JPMF1 2026-FX1 conduit pre-markets May 18, prices on or about May 21. Seventeen five-year fixed-rate loans on 24 stabilized apartment properties across 12 states; the deal marks MF1’s inaugural fixed-rate multifamily conduit and is one of the largest agency-alternative apartment CMBS offerings of the year.
• CRE News: Publix pays $78 million ($436.42/sf) for the 178,726-square-foot Fountains of Boynton Shopping Center, acquired from a private seller and reported by South Florida Business Journal via Commercial Real Estate Direct on May 19 — a top grocery-anchored retail trade of the week.
• CRE News: Bank of America lends $65 million to the Roostaeian family office against nine Los Angeles apartment properties, reported May 19 — a mid-size multifamily refi data point in a still-tight LA bank-financing market.
• CRE News: Principal pays $80.63 million for a Raleigh, N.C., retail property; InvenTrust pays $16.6 million for a Charlotte, N.C., retail asset (both reported May 19), continuing the institutional rotation into Sun Belt grocery-anchored and necessity retail.
• The Real Deal: New York’s top commercial trade for May 19 — 698 West End Avenue, a 90-unit, 91,500 SF Upper West Side multifamily building, sold for $42 million to a Benchmark Real Estate Group affiliate. The seller, 698 D Realty LLC, had held the asset for decades.

INDUSTRY NEWS

• PR Newswire: Rocket Mortgage and Redfin launch joint homebuyer-affordability offer of up to $20,000 in combined lender credits and Redfin commission discount (May 19). Existing Rocket-serviced clients can save up to $20,000 across buy, sell, and finance; new clients are capped at $12,000.
• National Mortgage Professional: Two Harbors adjourns special meeting to May 28; UWM and CCM keep fighting. ISS recommended voting AGAINST the CCM transaction, the Maryland court denied the stockholder TRO, and KBW says CCM “will have to raise its bid” to close.
• American Banker: Trump fintech EO directs the Fed to evaluate master-account access for non-bank fintechs and uninsured depositories within 120 days. Capital Alpha Partners’ Ian Katz: “We don’t expect that the order will be ignored by incoming Fed Chair Kevin Warsh.” Material for any mortgage fintech, non-bank servicer, or digital-asset firm currently dependent on correspondent-bank rails.
• LinkedIn: Tim Rood (Impact Capitol) revisits Reg AB — an argument that the SEC’s 2014 Reg AB II amendments and the SEC’s open Concept Release on Asset-Backed Securities remain a central reason no registered private-label RMBS has been issued since 2014, and that resolving the disclosure mismatch between registered deals and 144A is now the binding constraint on rebuilding a non-agency mortgage capital market.
• Mortgage News Daily: MBA Secondary & Capital Markets Conference (New York) wraps; AI governance, sub-servicing, and AI MBS trading dominate the hallway conversation. Rob Chrisman’s MND-syndicated column flagged AI governance and LO comp as recurring themes across the New York sessions earlier in the week.