Every real figure on this site — mortgage rates, closing costs, housing trends, the pop-culture references we build articles around — traces back to one of the sources below. Anything not listed here (a specific dollar amount in a calculation walkthrough, for example) is our own illustrative estimate, clearly framed as such in the article itself. See our About Us page for who we are and Privacy Policy for how we make money.
Mortgage rates
Freddie Mac Primary Mortgage Market Survey® (PMMS) — the weekly average 30-year and 15-year fixed mortgage rates shown across this site and used in every article's real-rate calculations.
Treasury yields & Fed funds rate
Federal Reserve Statistical Release H.15 (Selected Interest Rates) — Treasury yield and Fed funds rate context used in our trend analysis.
Closing costs
CFPB Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) data — real, state-level average total loan closing costs and interest rates from actual mortgage originations, cited by name wherever we use it.
Housing market trends
Redfin Data Center — monthly housing affordability, luxury home market, and inter-metro migration data, used to spot real trends worth writing about.
Pop-culture trend signals
TVmaze (data licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0) and Wikimedia Pageviews (CC0, public domain) — what shows and movies are actually trending, used to inform which topics we cover. We never use TMDB (The Movie Database) anywhere on this site, and never use FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data) — see the note below.
A note on what we deliberately don't use
TMDB's terms of service prohibit both commercially-monetized use and AI-application use, so we never integrate it in any form. FRED's terms similarly prohibit AI-application use — we source Freddie Mac's own published rate history and the Federal Reserve's own H.15 release directly instead, both of which are cited above.
AI assistance
Articles on this site are researched and drafted with AI assistance, then reviewed and approved by a human before publishing — every published article says so in its byline. Any AI-generated illustration is captioned as such; real photos are always credited to their actual source and license.