What a September rate hike does to the quotes you sent in May

Somewhere in your truck, or in a folder on your phone, there's a stack of quotes from this spring that never turned into work.

You know the ones. The roof that has maybe two winters left in it. The kitchen where one of them wants it done and the other wants to wait. The furnace that limped through last January and is going to get one more try. You went out, measured, priced it fair, sent it over, and got back "thanks, we'll let you know." It's September and they haven't let you know.

Some of those went quiet for a reason, and on Friday the reason changed for a few of them. The few are worth a phone call.

What happened on Friday

On August 28 the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Kevin Warsh, gave the big annual speech at Jackson Hole and said inflation is still higher than the Fed wants and rates may need to go up. For most of this year the working assumption had been that the next move was down. By the end of that afternoon traders had the odds of a hike at the September 16 meeting at better than a coin flip, and by this week somewhere around two in three. The ten year Treasury, which is the number a mortgage follows, is sitting near 4.8 percent, the highest since January 2025. Some of that is the same oil story I wrote about last week feeding through into prices. Some of it is Friday.

What that looks like at a kitchen table: a thirty year mortgage is 6.66 percent as of last Thursday, a home equity line is around 7.3 percent for somebody with very good credit and more for everybody else, and the prime rate those lines float on is 6.75 and moves the day the Fed moves.

None of that is mine to have a view on, and I'd be wary of a testimonial company that did. The part that is my business is what that number does once it gets inside the house.

How a twenty thousand dollar job gets paid for

Almost nobody writes a check for a roof. A roof, a furnace and condenser swap, a kitchen, a full repaint of a two story house: that money comes from one of three places. A home equity line. The financing you offer through whoever your supplier set you up with. Or a credit card they intend to pay off and won't. Every one of those has a rate on it, and two of the three float. When prime goes up a quarter point on September 16, the home equity line goes up a quarter point on the next statement.

Which is how a speech in Wyoming lands in a kitchen in Rockford. The customer who was waiting for rates to come down before doing the roof has just been told, by the one person whose opinion on the subject counts, that they may go up instead.

The handful who decide to go now

When people hear "it might cost more to borrow next month," they split.

Most shelve it. The kitchen goes back to being a someday. The roof gets one more winter. Remodelers have been watching this all year: the home builders' association survey has backlogs and new leads both drifting down since the spring, and Harvard's remodeling forecast has spending growth slowing through the end of the year, with borrowing costs named as the reason. Nothing you do changes those people's minds and I wouldn't try.

Some do the opposite. "If it's going to cost more to finance in October, let's do it now." It's the same instinct that has people scrambling to lock a mortgage the week rates start climbing. A handful of your spring quotes will go that way, and those are the ones that turn into a phone call in the next two weeks, made to whichever contractor they happen to remember.

They've forgotten you

Here is what four months does. In May you were the guy who came out, was polite, measured carefully and sent a clean number. In September you're a PDF. The customer pulls out three of them and does not remember which of you was the one they liked. They remember the numbers, roughly, and they remember the one who showed up late.

So before they call, they do what everybody does now, which is look you up again. Website, Google, whatever comes up first. They are not researching from scratch. They're trying to remember why they liked you, and what they find in that thirty seconds decides which of the three PDFs gets the call.

A site that says "quality work, fair prices" gives them nothing to remember. Three sentences from a family two streets over, saying you did their roof in April and cleaned up so well the neighbors didn't know you'd been there, is the thing that makes the guy with the middle price the one who gets the job.

The call worth making this week

This is the one news post I've written where you can act on it in days rather than seasons, because the list of people to call already exists. It's your open quotes.

Go through everything you sent between March and June that never closed. Call them, or text if that's how they talked to you. Keep it short and don't pitch. Something like:

Hi, it's Dave from Dave's Roofing. I quoted your roof back in May and I know it wasn't the right time. I'm putting the fall schedule together and wanted to see if it's still on your list. No pressure either way.

Then, and this is where testimonials come in, send proof with it. "Here's what the folks over on Alpine said after we did theirs in June." One real sentence from one real customer, in the same text. If your quote is in a drawer next to two others, that sentence is the thing the other two don't have.

If you don't have one to send, get one this afternoon. Go back to the spring jobs that did close, the happy ones, and ask. "I'm following up with some people I quoted in the spring and I'd love to include a line from you about how yours went." People are glad to be asked and it takes them two minutes. Then it goes on the website, and it goes out with every follow-up you send this month.

Where this stops being true

Rates may not go up at all. Warsh didn't commit to anything, and the people whose entire job is guessing what the Fed will do have been wrong about it most of this year. The meeting is September 16 and it can go either way.

Don't push financing on anybody, either, and don't lean on "it'll cost more next month" as a closing line. The customer who does the roof because they got scared into it is the one who leaves the review you don't want. The ones who pull the trigger early will decide that on their own. Your only job is to be the one they remember when they do.

And a rate hike doesn't make anybody need a roof. Nobody's shingles care what the Fed does. What a hike does is shake a few decisions loose from the pile that's been sitting since spring, at a moment when every one of those decisions gets re-made by somebody looking at your website for thirty seconds. A narrow thing, but it happens this month rather than next year, and it costs you a phone call.

If the website is the part that's missing, Exalted is one link you text to a client. They write two lines, you approve it, it's on your site. Nine dollars a month. There are pages for roofers, HVAC techs and general contractors, and the folder of quiet quotes looks the same in every trade.

Written the morning of 2 September 2026, two weeks before the Fed meets. Every figure above was current that morning, and every one of them moves daily, so treat this as that morning's snapshot rather than something to rely on next week.