How Ralo Sources Its Rates and Data
Every rate on this site is priced for a stated borrower scenario on a stated date, and is shown with its APR. This page sets out those scenarios, how often each number is refreshed, and the public datasets behind the housing figures.
Last reviewed 2026-10-05
Rates are illustrations, not quotes
Ralo is a licensed mortgage broker, not a lender. The rates published here come from Ralo's pricing engine for a fixed example borrower. They show what that scenario priced at on the stated date. Your own rate depends on your credit score, down payment, property, occupancy, loan amount and lock period, and can only be given after you share those details.
No rate is published without the APR from the same pricing result. If the APR is missing, the rate is left out.
The Rate Index
The Rate Index and the chart on the rates page track one scenario, priced once a day: a $500,000 conforming loan on a primary residence in Travis County, Texas, with 25% down and a 780 credit score. The 30-year, 20-year and 15-year fixed terms are each recorded with rate and APR.
The comparison line is the Freddie Mac Primary Mortgage Market Survey national average, published each Thursday. The survey averages many lenders and borrowers, so the two lines describe different things: one scenario against a national mean.
County, city and ZIP rate grids
Location pages in the states where Ralo is licensed show a grid of 30-year fixed rates for credit scores of 660, 700, 740, 780 with 20% and 5% down. Each county is priced at one home price, taken from the middle of the home values on its pages, and the grid states that price. Every city and ZIP page in a county reads the same county grid.
Grids are repriced on business days. A grid older than 10 days is removed from the page until it is repriced. The full history is published as the City Rate Index.
The weekly rate report
The weekly rate report is assembled each Monday from the same pricing records. The tables are generated directly from the data. The short commentary above them is written by a language model from those figures and is checked automatically before it publishes: every number must match the data, and every rate must carry its APR.
A report does not publish if the current 30-year rate is missing, is more than a week old, or sits more than 1 percentage point from the Freddie Mac average. The report makes no forecasts.
Public data sources
- National average mortgage rate: Freddie Mac Primary Mortgage Market Survey, via FRED. Weekly, each Thursday.
- Conforming loan limits by county: Federal Housing Finance Agency. Yearly.
- Home price trends by state and metro: FHFA House Price Index. Quarterly.
- Home values and household income by state and ZIP code: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey five-year estimates. Yearly.
- Home values and rents by city and neighborhood: Zillow Research (ZHVI and ZORI). Monthly.
- Benchmark index for adjustable-rate loans: SOFR, Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Daily.
Corrections
If a figure on this site looks wrong, write to the team. Figures found to be wrong are corrected or removed, and a retracted weekly report is taken down, not edited in place.