Record Low Mortgage Rates Helping To Stir The Housing Market

MCLEAN, Va., July 19, 2012  /PRNewswire/ — Freddie Mac (OTC: FMCC) today released the results of its Primary Mortgage Market Survey^®(PMMS^®), showing the average 30-year and 15-year fixed-rate mortgage hitting new all-time record lows along with the 5-year ARM. The average 30-year fixed has been below 4.00 percent all but one week in 2012. The average 15-year fixed-rate mortgage has been below 3.00 percent for 8 consecutive weeks. Freddie Mac’s Chief Economist highlights how these record low mortgage rates are fueling housing demand in its July U.S. Economic and Housing Market Outlook.

News Facts

• 30-year fixed-rate mortgage (FRM) averaged 3.53 percent with an average 0.7 point for the week ending July 19, 2012, down from last week when it averaged 3.56 percent. Last year at this time, the 30-year FRM averaged 4.52 percent. 
• 15-year FRM this week averaged 2.83 percent with an average 0.6 point, down from last week when it averaged 2.86 percent. A year ago at this time, the 15-year FRM averaged 3.66 percent. 
• 5-year Treasury-indexed hybrid adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM) averaged 2.69 percent this week, with an average 0.6 point, down from last week when it averaged 2.74 percent. A year ago, the 5-year ARM averaged 3.27 percent.
• 1-year Treasury-indexed ARM averaged 2.69 percent this week with an average 0.4 point, the same as last week. At this time last year, the 1-year ARM averaged 2.97 percent.  

Average commitment rates should be reported along with average fees and points to reflect the total upfront cost of obtaining the mortgage. Visit the following links for Regional and National Mortgage Rate Details and Definitions. Borrowers may still pay closing costs which are not included in the survey.

Quotes

Attributed to Frank Nothaft, vice president and chief economist, Freddie Mac.

“With little signs of inflation and the Federal Reserve’s “Operation Twist” keeping U.S. Treasury bond yields in check, fixed mortgage rates are remaining low and helping to stir the housing market. For instance, the 12-month growth rate in the core Consumer Price Index has been in a narrow 2.1 to 2.3 percent band over the past nine months ending in June. Meanwhile, new construction on one-family homes rose for the fourth consecutive month in June to its strongest pace since April 2010 with builders restocking their lean inventories of new homes.  In fact, homebuilder confidence for the next six months rose for the third month in a row in July to its highest reading since March 2007.”

Get the latest information from Freddie Mac’s Office of the Chief Economist on Twitter:@FreddieMac

Freddie Mac was established by Congress in 1970 to provide liquidity, stability and affordability to the nation’s residential mortgage markets. Freddie Mac supports communities across the nation by providing mortgage capital to lenders. Today Freddie Mac is making home possible for one in four homebuyers and is one of the largest sources of financing for multifamily housing. www.FreddieMac.com.

SOURCE Freddie Mac

For further information: Chad Wandler, +1-703-903-2446, Chad_Wandler@FreddieMac.com

You’re familiar with the cliché “don’t put the cart in front of the horse.” That is exactly what many marketers do when they develop a new website. They design the look and feel of a website, commission the developer to build it, and then they add the content as the last step. When it comes to digital marketing strategy, this is backwards!

Start With the End in Mind

That’s another familiar cliché, but it’s not so commonly applied to website design. The content strategy of a website should be planned first! Your website’s content serves two masters. It should serve the visitor to your website first and foremost, with relevant and compelling content that engages the visitor to your website. Additionally, your content should be friendly to search engines so your website is discoverable for desirable keywords in organic search results. Every website owner wants this.

How Well Do You Really Know Your Customer?

In order to be in business you have to know a thing or two about your customers. But how well do you really understand them? Most businesses have multiple customer segments. Your website content strategy should not use a one size fits all approach. Persona analysis helps you identify your target customers by segments, as well as who influences each segment. Most important, persona segmentation should identify their needs from the customer’s perspective so that you can develop your content strategy to address the specific needs of each segment.

For example if you sell a health care product that serves children your persona segments may include K-12, national, state and local government entities that govern children’s health care, pediatricians, parents, non-profits who specialize in child care services and others. The content for each segment should speak uniquely to how your product addresses a need that is relevant to the persona segment and (in this example) children. How well you segment your customer persona segments feeds right into your keyword research.

Persona Analysis Precedes Keyword Research

Any SEO professional knows the importance of conducting keyword research. Keyword research that is conducted after the persona analysis is far more relevant. It will help the marketer greatly align keywords against their targeted persona segments. It will allow you to prioritize keywords. And, it will help in developing an effective content strategy for the new website.

Competitive Analysis

Understanding your competitors’ digital strengths and weaknesses is essential in building a digital marketing strategy with a competitive edge. Your biggest competitor’s digital marketing strategy is sometimes not one you should emulate. In order to build competitive edge, you should understand which aspects of your competitor’s digital strategy have been executed well. You may discover that some of your desirable keywords return results on page one in Google for companies with whom you don’t even compete. By returning to your content strategy, you can determine which competitive battles are worth fighting. Few businesses have the resources to win every digital marketing battle. The appropriate cliché here is “pick your battles carefully.” Thorough online competitive research can reveal many insights to help you decide which battles you should fight so you can concentrate on winning the war, not just a few battles (another cliché).

You Need a Strong Foundation to Construct a Skyscraper

A skyscraper is not just a building. It is a very tall building. The construction project of a skyscraper starts with months of work creating a very strong foundation before the building construction begins. Likewise, a strong digital marketing strategy should begin with a rock solid foundation. Your website is the most important digital asset. Therefore, your investment in creating a strong foundation can provide outstanding digital marketing ROI. In addition to having a well planned content strategy, the website’s underlying architecture should be very solid.

Website Architecture is Mission Critical

A sound website architecture generally includes a good CMS that is SEO friendly, a well executed internal link structure and URLs that align with the content on each page. There are other factors, but these are the big ones to list in this brief article. In our ten years as a digital marketing agency we’ve been engaged countless times by companies that redesigned their website with little or no regard for the architecture’s impact on SEO. This is like building the skyscraper with no thought given to the plumbing and wiring infrastructure. It’s mission critical to a website.

Contrary to conventional thinking, your website is not about your company. Your website is the most important digital asset for visitors to discover what you offer that solves a problem or interest. Your navigation strategy must be intuitive to what visitors are looking for. The navigation of your website must be simple and intuitive. The content should address your visitor’s interests, not your interests. Make content easy to find, and when they find it, it should be about the visitor, not about you. Your calls-to-action (CTA) should be relevant to each customer segment to capture leads or online transactions.

For example if you sell a consumer product in the sports industry, your navigation and content should speak to each customer segment specifically by sport or by demographic. As you deliver CTAs, segment your list so that you can nurture people according to their specific interests.

Digital Marketing Success

Digital marketing is all about attracting customers to your business through various digital channels. Each industry is competitive. And, customers have choices. The marketers that outperform competitors with persona segmentation and deliver a relevant navigation and content experience in all digital marketing assets starting with their website, followed by all social media assets, win the most customers. Visit our digital marketing success stories to learn more.

Yesterday, HubSpot hosted a one-time-only webinar on the Science of Inbound Marketing, hosted by Dan Zarrella, HubSpot’s social media scientist, and VP of Marketing at Hootsuite Ben Watson. As you might have heard, we tried to break the world record for the largest webinar ever, but missed the mark. So for now, that record is still held by, well, HubSpot… but we gave ourselves a run for our money 😉

Just because we didn’t break the record, though, doesn’t mean that the Science of Inbound Marketing wasn’t an epic success. And as always, you guys had some excellent questions to ask of our presenters, not all of which we could get to on Thursday. And since we’re not publishing the webinar or it’s slides, we’re more than pleased to answer a round of them here! Read on to get the answers to your top seven questions about the science of inbound marketing.

Answers to the Top 7 Questions From #InboundSci

1) Why do you consider email marketing to be inbound?

Inbound marketing is all about attracting people to your business by providing interesting, helpful, relevant content, instead of interrupting people who aren’t interested in your business by shoving your message down their throat. As such, email marketing, when approached in an inbound fashion, is one part of the entire inbound marketing landscape: SEO, social media, blogging, etc.

What do I mean by “inbound” email marketing? It means you’re only emailing people who have explicitly asked that you email them — you’ve done something to attract them to you so much so that they have asked to receive more communications from you. With an opt-in email list, it’s up to you as an email marketer to keep up that inbound approach by providing those contacts with the same kind of helpful, informative content that made them attracted to you in the first place. But if you start blasting an unsegmented email list with irrelevant content, whether they opted in or not, you’re no longer doing email marketing that fits into the inbound marketing approach.

2) How do you make a somewhat boring product or industry more interesting on social media?

First, it’s critical to remember that what you think is “boring” isn’t boring to leads who are looking for that exact solution! For example, changing your oil is kind of a boring topic to most people outside the auto industry … until they need to learn how to change their oil, that is.

That being said, it’s all about finding a relatable angle for your audience. If your social media content addresses your network’s pain points, it will be inherently interesting. If you haven’t defined personas yet, this will be extremely helpful in identifying those pain points so your content can center around them.

Social media is also a more laid back medium than, say, email. I mean, it’s right there in the name — “social” media. So don’t be afraid to be a little humorous! Use visual content instead of making people read! Heck, combine the two and do some memejacking! We’ve written an entire post on how to make “boring” content interesting if you’re looking for more ideas, but if you can center your social content around your audience’s pain points and lighten it up with a more colloquial tone, you’ll have a much more engaged social network.

3) Any thoughts on what makes people more likely to engage on social media?

Good question. Engagement is one of those fluffy marketing words that’s actually pretty important — if people don’t engage with your social content, you’ll have a mighty hard time growing your reach and getting that juicy lead-gen content out to the masses. But that doesn’t mean you should only post lead-gen content; that alone won’t get you social engagement. A mix of content is best — lead generation content, third-party content, news content, and particularly visual content for sites like Facebook, Google+, and Pinterest.

Dan also performed some research to determine not just what content types incite social shares, but what, on a higher level, motivates social media fans and followers to share. Take a look at what he found:

So ask yourself — is the content you’re posting to social media novel, or is it just the same ol’ thing people are used to reading? Or perhaps you’re breaking some critical news; that would certainly play into your network’s desire to share relevant content. After all, everyone loves to be the first to break big news. Or perhaps you’re not unleashing anything groundbreaking via your social networks today, but you do have some thought leadership content in your arsenal. If you can make your network sound smart to their networks, you’re providing the type of content people will share.

4) What factors tend to influence an email’s click-through rate?

As Dan and Ben both highlighted in the webinar, the time of day that an email lands in a recipient’s inbox is a huge influence on your email’s click-through rate. While the best times to send emails will inevitably vary by audience, Dan’s data shows that sending an email out at 6 AM yielded the highest click-through rate.
The lowest click-through rate, on the other hand, happened at 4 PM, just before the end of a 9-5 work day. People are likely paying less attention to their inboxes at this time, and are probably more focused on finishing the day’s tasks before going home.

5) If I send emails more frequently, can I get blacklisted as a spammer?

You certainly can, but getting blacklisted as a spammer isn’t typically dependent on just one behavior like increasing email frequency. The frequency with which you email should really be dependent on the size of your audience and your ability to appropriately segment them. You don’t need to include every contact in your database in every single email send you schedule — in fact, doing this will result in more unsubscribes and SPAM reports, because the content contained in the email message can’t possibly be relevant to such a broad audience. It’s that type of email marketing behavior that gets you blacklisted as a spammer. If you’re interested in increasing the frequency of your email marketing sends, it’s best to approach it scientifically; reference our blog post that tells you how to run an email sending frequency test.

6) How do audiences respond to command words in calls-to-action?

According to Dan’s data, pretty negatively, especially if that word is “submit.” In fact, using the word “submit” earned email senders a 14% conversion rate, while using a CTA without the word “submit” increased that conversion rate to 17%.

When it comes to conversion rates, every percentage point matters. Dan extended his research to look at the number of clicks buttons received based on other copy, too. While “Submit” wasn’t the worst copy you could use, it’s greatly surpassed in performance by “Click Here” and “Go.”

The moral of the story? People respond much better to certain command words in CTAs than others!

7) How can a company or brand increase blog readership?

Well, lots of things! But the key is to capitalize on each kind of traffic your blog receives — organic, direct, paid, email, social, etc. For example, do you know that email is an excellent source of traffic for your blog already? Perhaps you should put effort towards increasing blog subscribers, then, so your blog alert emails can help drive more traffic. Start putting blog subscribe buttons on more visible parts of your website, promoting your blog subscription in email marketing sends, and sharing it via social media.

Or perhaps you’ve seen that a lot of your blog traffic comes from organic search, but you haven’t really been putting much effort into SEO. That’s a big lever you can pull to increase blog readership if you’re already seeing some success with very little effort! Identify keywords you’d like to drive traffic for, and generate topics around them to start driving more organic traffic to your site.

Many companies also find success growing their blog readership by guest blogging more frequently. Not only does guest blogging — writing blog content for other websites — help you get access to a new audience that doesn’t know you yet, but the inbound links will help you with that SEO, too 😉

Social media are on your laptop, your smart phone and your tablet, they’re at home, at work and on the road, they’re used by private individuals, major corporations and ambitious start-ups. In short: They’re everywhere. One vertical, meanwhile, which has remained somewhat hesitant to embrace the social media revolution is banking. Not only were banks slow to start posting on Facebook, tweeting on twitter and setting up circles on google plus. They were also sceptical about offering products and services directly connected to the social media market. As this is now slowly starting to change, it is about time to have a look at what this means for banking in general and you in particular.

Banks are waking up to social media

One thing’s for sure: Banks are quickly trying to catch up with the rest of the world and regaining lost ground with regards to social media. Today, all but a few banks have accounts at all major social media platforms and are developing related products and applications. Making the transition hasn’t been easy, as some of them are finding it hard to develop the kind of direct and personal interaction that the entertainment industry excels in – while others are facing tough opposition by critics. Deutsche Bank, for example, is under constant attack on Facebook for its alleged involvement in rainforest logging.

But as banks are gaining experience in the field, they are slowly but surely learning to deal with these attacks and developping strategies to put social media to their advantage.

Social media banking: Start-up problems

That said, there are still plenty of reasons to be sceptical about social media banking. First of all, the terms is already highly problematic in itself:

Social media is all about publicity, while banking is all about privacy. Social media is about collectivity, while banking is restricted to individuals. Social media is about a lean-back approach to communication, while banking is and should be formal and serious.

Needless to say, too, the concept of social media is to remain logged in all the time and everywhere, while your banking activity should ideally remain restricted to a safe location, where you can be sure that no one is secretly spying on you. By conflating these fundamentally contrary tendencies, social media banking is creating various problems and contradictions, which still need to be sorted out.

But social media can be useful, too!

As much as there are still problems, social media banking also holds some great promises and potentials. For one, if banks are truly starting to use social media as platforms for one to one customer communication, then this may make them more customer-oriented in the long run and banking more human. Also, social media banking apps are not wrong per se. Since social media have created environments which are strikingly more easy to use than the average online banking interface, they may make the process of setting up standing orders, transferring money or simply checking your account status more convenient and intuitive.

One should also not forget that a site like Twitter has made it a lot easier to find banking information from all around the world and therefore improve customer expertise on fundamental banking topics. This way, consumers can engage in a much deeper and equal dialogue with banks.

How to take the first social media banking steps

With all of the above in mind, how can you take the first steps into the world of social media banking? One thing you should definitely do is take advantage of Twitter’s news facilities by creating an account specifically for banking and start following banks and financial news providers to stay in touch with the latest developments. Avoid jumping on Facebook apps for social media banking until they have proven their efficiency and security. Instead, get yourself a guaranteed account for online banking, which will allow you to take care of your finances quickly, safely, 24/7 and from wherever you are.

As social media banking is becoming more popular, new and exciting services are sure to follow. The exact effects are impossible to predict, but one thing’s for sure: Banking will never be the same again and that need not be a bad thing.

Mariah Carey’s villa in the Bahamas is now up for sale.

The pop stars’ property, located on Windermere Island, was listed on the market more than a year ago, The Real Estalker reveals, but has managed to go for 12 months without being noticed by the press.

How the 4,000 square feet estate, complete with marble walkways, terraces, four pavilions, two garages and a 40-foot long swimming pool, avoided detection is a mystery, but Carey and her partner Nick Cannon attracted headlines in 2008 when they married at the villa, one year after buying the property.

“Reports show she shelled out somewhere around $5,000,000,” adds The Real Estalker. The current asking price for the villa is $5.5 million – a price that should help the couple continue to spend their summer holidaying at a reportedly expensive rental home in the Hamptons.

f you spend some time reading business articles, you are bound to come across those that contain glowing remarks about using social media. Probably 99 percent of the articles out there, whether in magazines or on blogs and commentaries, insist that you need to be on social media. They speak for the 99 percent, after all (that’s a little fun jab at the Wall Street occupiers). But before you throw your efforts into building a buzz on the social media bandwagon, you may want to re-think your efforts, and here’s why!

Too many people today are participating in social media efforts to the exclusion of using traditional routes, such as good old fashioned networking. (Remember, when we used to meet people face to face and shake hands?) Going completely digital and bypassing face time is detrimental to your business for a number of reasons, including:

• All that social media makes you feel bad about yourself. If you haven’t yet realized this little fact, start paying attention! Check out the majority of posts on Twitter and Facebook, and you will see that they are overwhelmingly positive. It makes sense, after all, because nobody wants to share misery with their audience. So what happens is that post after post is a celebration. Reading all those positive, amazing things at a certain point can make you feel bad about yourself, as if you aren’t keeping up. So here’s the tip – first, recognize that social media is not a representation of reality and, second, read it less and you will feel better about yourself!

• Many people, perhaps even you, feel that communication on social media is just as good as – or perhaps even better than – being face to face. After all, it’s fast, it’s direct, it’s easy. Sure, it requires less effort on everyone’s part…but is that necessarily a good thing? Take that client that you’ve been pursuing and talking with via Twitter. If your competitor simply meets with them face to face, they have a major advantage! They are real, after all. Real people are trusted more than electronics. And really your Twitter communication could be a spammer trying to in the end, sell you something.
• You lose efficiency. You have to know this! You may think you are saving time by using social media sites, but they can be addicting. Before you know it, an hour has gone by, and your productivity tanks! I bet, like most people, you are most productive when no one else distracts you and your email is turned off. It isn’t much of a stretch to see that fewer distractions occurring less frequently result in more productivity. Social media, with its constant stream of updates, kills efficiency and productivity.

• Shorter and shorter relationships result. Social media is great for building an instant relationship, albeit a shallow one. But to attain that greater ability to communicate with more and more people, the trade-off is that your connections become more and more shallow. Deep relationships that are long-term and trusting are the foundation of a great business. Social medial alone might be quick at building a house of cards, but it is a house of cards, nonetheless.

All the social media in the world can never replace simply meeting someone face to face and having a conversation. Social media lacks the depth that is involved in real meetings. Through social media, everyone remains a screen name, so the relationships stays distant, which makes it challenging to move it forward and let it flourish.

When you opt for a real networking opportunity, there is the chance to truly get to know someone and make a connection. It is those connections that bond us together and will help your business to thrive. Get back to the basics of looking people in the eye, and see how much better you, and your prospects, feel as a result!

Confidence among U.S. consumers dropped in June for a fourth consecutive month as mounting concern over jobs and incomes dimmed the outlook for spending.

The Conference Board’s sentiment index fell to 62, a five- month low, from a revised 64.4 in May, figures from the New York-based private research group showed today. Another report showed home prices were stabilizing.

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Consumer Confidence in U.S. Dropped to a Five-Month Low in June

Patrick Fallon/Bloomberg

Pedestrians pass in front of a C & J Clark America Inc. store at the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, California.

Pedestrians pass in front of a C & J Clark America Inc. store at the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, California. Photographer: Patrick Fallon/Bloomberg

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June 26 (Bloomberg) — Robert Shiller, an economics professor at Yale University and co-creator of the S&P/Case-Shiller index of property values in 20 cities, talks about the U.S. housing market. The S&P/Case-Shiller index dropped 1.9 percent in April from the same month in 2011, the smallest decline since November 2010. Shiller speaks with Tom Keene and Ken Prewitt on Bloomberg Radio’s “Surveillance.” (Source: Bloomberg)

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June 26 (Bloomberg) — Chris Rupkey, chief financial economist at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ, talks about U.S. consumer confidence for June and outlook for the economy. The Conference Board’s consumer confidence index dropped for a fourth straight month to 62 from a revised 64.4 in the prior month. (Source: Bloomberg)

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June 26 (Bloomberg) — Sarah Quinlan, founder of QAM and co-chair of Trader/Portfolio Management Peer Advisory Group for 100 Women Hedge Funds, talks about the potential impact of the European debt crisis on U.S. consumers. Quinlan, speaking with Stephanie Ruhle and Erik Schatzker on Bloomberg Television’s “Market Movers,” also discusses oil prices and the U.S. economic outlook. (Source: Bloomberg)

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The slide in confidence raises the risk that the slowdown in hiring revealed by last month’s jobs report will cause households to retrench, restraining the spending that accounts for about 70 percent of the economy. The weak labor market is overshadowing the benefit of the lowest gasoline prices in five months, one reason why companies like Ford Motor Co. (F) are keeping an eye on attitudes.

“The employment situation continues to weigh on consumer minds,” said Yelena Shulyatyeva, a U.S. economist at BNP Paribas in New York, who correctly forecast the confidence index. “Usually consumers react to falling gasoline prices by increasing their spending, but this time around it looks like they’re a little bit cautious.”

Stocks fluctuated between gains and losses, held back by concern over the drop in confidence and the European debt crisis. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index rose 0.3 percent to 1,317.79 at 12:07 p.m. in New York.

Elsewhere, Britain had a larger budget shortfall than economists forecast in May as the recession hit taxes and pushed up welfare spending.

The median forecast of 69 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News projected the U.S. confidence index would fall to 63. Estimates ranged from 58 to 66.8. The measure averaged 53.7 during the 18-month recession that ended in June 2009.

Home Prices

An improvement in residential real estate may help limit the decline in sentiment. Home prices in 20 cities fell at a slower pace in the 12 months ended in April, showing the industry that precipitated the last recession is stabilizing, other data showed. The S&P/Case-Shiller index of property values dropped 1.9 percent from a year earlier, the smallest decrease since November 2010, the group reported in New York.

Home prices adjusted for seasonal variations climbed 0.7 percent in April, matching the prior month’s gain, which was revised up from a previously reported 0.1 percent increase. It was the best back-to-back performance since mid-2009.

“Housing has picked up,” said Ryan Wang, an economist at HSBC Securities USA Inc. in New York, who correctly forecast the monthly jump in prices. “Sales have improved and the inventory of homes for sale has been falling, which has brought a bit more balance into the market and fed into a bit of stabilization.”

Expectations Dim

The Conference Board’s confidence gauge reflected growing concern about the short-term outlook. The gauge of expectations for the next six months fell to 72.3, the lowest level since November, from 77.3 a month earlier. The measure of present conditions climbed to 46.6 from 44.9 in May.

That mimics the results of the latest Bloomberg Consumer Comfort Index issued last week, which showed the fewest Americans in five months said the economy was improving in June. The Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan’s preliminary sentiment measure fell this month to the lowest level this year.

“We’ve seen consumer confidence come off its highs,” Mark Fields, president of the Americas for Ford, told reporters today in Dearborn, Michigan. “We’ll continue to monitor the marketplace and take decisive action no matter where the economy goes.” Fields said Ford is having “solid” June sales even as the economy shows mixed signals.

Darden Restaurants Inc. (DRI), owner of the Red Lobster, Olive Garden and LongHorn Steakhouse restaurant chains, last week reported fourth-quarter revenue that trailed analysts’ estimates because of an unexpected drop in sales at its older establishments. The company said things took a turn for the worse last month.

‘More Cautious’

“We saw the consumer get a lot more cautious in May,” Clarence Otis, chairman and chief executive officer at Darden, said on a June 22 conference call with analysts. “And that was not just at Red Lobster, but across the restaurant industry and really, as we look out at the data that we get, generally across the overall consumer environment beyond restaurants.”

The share of respondents in the Conference Board’s survey that expected more jobs to become available in the next six months declined to 14.1, the lowest this year, from 15.4 the previous month. The proportion projecting an increase in incomes dropped to 14.8 percent from 15.7 percent.

“If this trend continues, spending may be restrained in the short term,” Lynn Franco, director of economic indicators at the Conference Board, said in a statement.

Buying Plans

Buying plans were mixed in June, with the share of households planning to buy autos unchanged from a month earlier, while fewer Americans said they intended to purchase major appliances. More consumers indicated they planned to buy a house in the next six months as lower mortgage rates make properties more affordable.

Employment growth and wage gains have been cooling. Payrolls climbed by 69,000 in May, the smallest increase in a year, Labor Department figures showed June 1. Average hourly earnings increased 1.7 percent in the 12 months ended in May, the smallest increase since December 2010.

The jobless rate last month rose to 8.2 percent from April’s 8.1 percent. It has held above 8 percent for 40 consecutive months, the longest stretch of such elevated levels in the post-World War II era.

To help combat weaker economic growth, Federal Reserve officials last week said they’ll expand Operation Twist, a program to replace short-term bonds with longer-term debt, by $267 billion through the end of 2012.

Fed’s Outlook

Policy makers also cut their expectations for growth in 2012 to a range of 1.9 percent to 2.4 percent, down from an April prediction of 2.4 percent to 2.9 percent. The forecasts have been lowered in five of the six economic projections since January 2011, when most central bankers predicted the economy would grow 3.5 percent to 4.4 percent in 2012.

One of the bright spots for the consumer has been falling gasoline prices. The price of a gallon of gas has declined 54 cents since reaching a high of $3.94 in April, according to AAA, the nation’s biggest auto group.