Canadians shouldn't “spend a lot of time thinking about the neutral rate,” BoC chief Tiff Macklem advised in his June 5 press conference.

But it's okay for him to spend a lot of time thinking about it.

In the Bank's own words, the neutral rate is:

• "An anchor" rate that's “an important input for its economic projections.”
• “Used to gauge the stance of monetary policy.”
• An ongoing topic in BoC press conferences, speeches, annual assessments, working papers, interviews, parliamentary testimony, and so on.

In other words, it's important.

In fact, it's so crucial that the BoC estimates it regularly, publishes those estimates for all to see, comments on it in every Monetary Policy Report, and uses those estimates as a core reference rate for its rate modelling.

When rates go bonkers - sky-high or rock-bottom - the neutral rate becomes the North Star for navigating back to normalcy. It's essentially the BoC's GPS after a wild rate cycle.

But Canadians shouldn't worry their pretty little heads over it. Just trust the experts, they suggest.

If you're a builder who wants to get your phones ringing, try this trick: flaunt a mortgage rate beginning with '2'.

And then brace for the hefty buydown.

For brokers or retail mortgage reps, this strategy typically isn't possible. For developers clearing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per unit, however, it is.

And this is precisely what more builders across the country are doing this very minute. We profiled one of them, VLS Developments, to find out what's behind its offer.

For those of us trying to move our mortgage sites up the Google ladder, the search behemoth's recent algorithm leak was a rare glimpse into its website ranking methods.

Google's search formula is still a sealed book, mind you, but we’ve now got a much better look at its table of contents.

To help mortgage marketers climb the ranks, MLN has listed seven of the more needle-moving ranking signals, as mentioned in the leak. They include multiple recently unveiled best practices.

Neo Financial's mortgage broker channel now caters exclusively to DLC Group brokers, as reported last week. While the strategy isn't exactly fresh out of the oven (it follows a similar announcement from nesto, which partnered with M3), we thought it was worth a little look-see.

As one can understand, broker networks just love to promote anything that's proprietary, especially exclusive lenders. For one thing, they're a money maker for the network due to overrides (lender kickbacks) and/or juicy connectivity fees. For another, exclusive rates and products sharpen a broker's competitive edge, provided the lender isn't just window dressing.

We got a sense of what Neo brings to the table in its webinar last week, which it hosted for about 400 DLC brokers. Here are some highlights: