NEW YORK, Jan 9, 2026, 05:15 (EST) — Premarket
- Opendoor shares rose about 5% before the bell as investors weighed a White House push to cut mortgage rates
- Housing-related stocks were mixed, with some homebuilders higher in early trade
- A Vanguard filing this week flagged a bigger stake in Opendoor
Opendoor Technologies shares rose 4.9% in premarket trading on Friday to $6.43, after President Donald Trump said he wanted government-backed mortgage giants to buy $200 billion in mortgage bonds in an effort to pull down borrowing costs. Financial Times
The move matters because Opendoor’s business lives and dies on housing turnover. Mortgage rates set the tone for demand, and even a small drop can loosen up buyers sitting on the sidelines and sellers locked into older, cheaper loans.
Trump said he was ordering his representatives to buy $200 billion in mortgage-backed securities — bonds backed by home loans — and Federal Housing Finance Agency director Bill Pulte said Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would execute the purchase. Redfin’s head of economics research, Chen Zhao, told Reuters the impact could be “fairly small,” estimating a 10 to 15 basis-point move (a basis point is 0.01 percentage point). reuters.com
Housing-linked shares moved in pockets. Homebuilder Lennar rose 5.4% in early trade and D.R. Horton added 4.7%, while Zillow gained 1.6%; mortgage lender Rocket Companies was little changed.
A separate tailwind for Opendoor bulls this week came from the shareholder list. Vanguard disclosed it owned 110.9 million Opendoor shares, or 11.62% of the company, in an amended Schedule 13G filing dated Jan. 7. Securities and Exchange Commission
Trump’s housing agenda has swung markets around. He said earlier this week he was moving to bar large Wall Street firms from buying single-family homes — a plan that hit some landlord and homebuilder shares and drew fresh scrutiny to how much big investors own, with a Government Accountability Office study cited by Reuters putting the institutional share of single-family rentals at about 3%. reuters.com
But there are risks in the bond-buying idea. TD Securities analysts warned the move could succeed in pushing rates down in the short run but also risk stoking home-price inflation because supply remains tight; Redfin chief economist Daryl Fairweather told the Associated Press it could shave roughly 0.25 to 0.5 percentage points off a 30-year fixed mortgage rate, while not fixing the supply problem. CBS News
Next up: investors are watching for any specifics from Pulte on timing and mechanics, and for Trump’s promised housing and affordability proposals at the World Economic Forum in Davos, which runs Jan. 19–23. reuters.com+1
