Mortgage rate monitor

The mortgage rates can be volatile. If you want to monitor the rates, instead of checking it manually each time, you can save time by setting up a monitoring task and get notified whenever the mortgage rates changed.

In this tutorial, we'll show you how to use iHook to monitor the 30-year fixed rate mortgage average in the United States, by extracting the data from St. Louis Fed website.

1. Create an iHook scheduled task

After logging into iHook dashboard, click the CREATE TASK button at the top left corner, then you will see the task creation form:

Under the Request Settings and Request Schedule sections, provide the following values:

Field	Value	Notes
Task Name	30-year fixed rate mortgage average in the United States	The name of the task
URL	https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MORTGAGE30US	St. Louis Fed website
Request Method	GET
Request Headers	None	No headers are needed
Request Schedule	Every 1 week	The task will run once every week

2. Create email notification

Next is to set up an email notification, so you can get notified with the latest rate.

Under the Notification section, click the ADD button next to the Email label:

Then a notification setup dialog will show up:

Then provide the following values in the dialog:

Field	Value	Notes
Source	Response Body (HTML)	Parse the HTTP response as HTML
CSS Selector	span.series-meta-observation-value	Path of the HTML element that contains rate data
Comparison	is any value
Email	Your email address
Subject	30-year fixed rate update	The email subject
Message	You can leave this field as-is	The email body

This tells iHook to send an email notification with the latest rate whenever the task is executed.

Now click SAVE, you will see the new email notification appear under the Notification section:

3. Save task

Click the CREATE button at the bottom of the task creation page:

You'll see the created task in ACTIVE state:

4. Test task

To make sure your task settings such as URL and notification rules are properly configured, it's recommended to test your task at least once.

You can perform the test by clicking the TEST button at the top of your task page. The TEST button will trigger the HTTP request right away, and evaluate all configured notification conditions.

If everything went smooth, you should see the mortgage rate appear in the Response Body section of the execution detail:

Congratulations! You will get email notification with latest mortgage rate every week!