On Monday, MBA submitted comments to the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s ongoing comprehensive review of the Federal Home Loan Bank System. MBA reiterated its long-standing advocacy for responsible expansion of FHLB membership to critical providers of mortgage origination, servicing and investment activities – such as mortgage REITs and independent mortgage banks – to add diversity to the FHLB System and to provide stable liquidity sources for key players in the single-family and multifamily mortgage markets.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday reported employers added 261,000 jobs in October; meanwhile, the unemployment rate ticked up to 3.7 percent.

U.S. hotel gross operating profit per available room improved in September and now exceeds the pre-pandemic comparable, said STR, Hendersonville, Tenn.

This week’s MBA Chart of the Week examines another metric from our PAPI dataset - the mortgage payment to rent ratio. The orange line relates the median principal and interest payment to the median asking rent, and the blue line relates the 25th percentile mortgage application payment to the median asking rent (that may be a more suitable ratio for first-time homebuyers).

Good morning, and happy Monday! We’ve got a lot to cover and just enough bandwidth, so let’s get started: