Who owns the customer? That depends on whom you ask.

Each installment of this series has opened with the 30-year rate higher than the one before it. When our first article ran, Freddie Mac’s weekly survey stood at 6.66%. The debate through the summer was whether rates would breach 7%. That debate is over. On September 10, the daily 30-year average crossed 7% for the first time since May 2025, and it has held at or near that threshold since, with the 10-year Treasury touching 5% ahead of this week’s Federal Reserve meeting. Freddie Mac’s weekly survey, which lags the dailies, sits at 6.76% and has risen for consecutive weeks. The question is no longer whether 7% arrives; it is what 7% changes. The answer runs directly through this week’s subject. Redfin data shows that 82.8% of homeowners carrying a mortgage hold a rate below 6%. The Federal Housing Finance Agency research cited in our second article established the consequence: Every point by which market rates exceed a homeowner’s existing rate reduces the probability of a sale by 18.1%. At 7%, that gap has never been wider for more households. Tens of millions of families are, in effect, waiting for one rate move, and when it arrives, the refinance wave will not ask which lender ad...