Somebody sends me a screenshot of a rate they were quoted on Tuesday, next to the rate they were quoted on Friday, and asks which one was the lie. Neither. They were both true on the day they were said, and neither was locked.
Where the number comes from
A lender does not set your rate by deciding how much they like you. Most residential mortgages are eventually sold into the bond market, and the price investors will pay for a pool of loans at a given rate moves continuously through the trading day. Lenders publish a rate sheet in the morning, and if the market moves enough, they reprice — sometimes twice before lunch.
So a quote is a snapshot of a moving thing. Which is exactly what a lock is for.
An unlocked rate is a weather forecast. A locked rate is an umbrella.
What a lock actually is
A lock is the lender agreeing to hold a rate for a set number of days — commonly 30, 45 or 60 — provided your file closes inside it. Longer locks cost more, because the lender is carrying the risk for longer. A lock is not free even when it looks free; the cost is inside the pricing.
Locks can expire. If your closing slips past the end of the lock, you extend, and extensions cost money. This is why the honest advice about locking is not "lock as early as possible" — it is "lock when your closing date is realistic and you can live with the number."
The other things that move your rate and are not the market
- Credit score bands. Pricing steps at thresholds. Four points can be worth nothing or a great deal depending on which side of a band you land.
- Loan-to-value. Also banded. The step at 80% is the famous one, but there are others.
- Property type. A condominium, a two-to-four unit and a single family are priced differently for the same borrower.
- Occupancy. Living in it, renting it out, or using it a fortnight a year are three different loans.
- Points. Paying money up front to lower the rate. Whether that is sensible depends entirely on how long you will hold the loan — the break-even arithmetic works the same way here.
How to compare two quotes honestly
Compare them on the same day, for the same lock period, with the same points, on the same property type. A rate quoted with two points is not comparable to one quoted with none, and a rate quoted on Tuesday is not comparable to one quoted on Friday. The loan estimate exists precisely so that this comparison is possible — it is a standard form for a reason.
And no website can tell you your rate, including this one. Every calculator here asks you to type one in, because the honest thing a website can do is show you the consequence of a number, not invent the number.
Written for a demonstration. Nadia Botelho is an invented broker and this article is example content showing what a real practitioner’s writing would occupy. It describes how these things generally work; it is not advice, and no figure in it is a quote.