A review of things you need to know before you go home on Wednesday; market leading call offer, fruit fly alert, tame farm sales, mortgage approvals up, swap rates rise and steepen

Here are the key things you need to know before you leave work today.

TODAY'S MORTGAGE RATE CHANGES
The Co-operative Bank cut its two and three year fixed home loan rates to levels that matched the lower end of the market. But neither rate change is market-leading.

TODAY'S DEPOSIT RATE CHANGES
Heartland Bank has launched a new call account, Direct Call, with a market leading 4.50% pa interest rate, with funds available at call and unlimited transfers to one nominated bank account. There are no fees and no annoying fine print. UDC cut all rates for all terms from 6 months to 5 years, but they increased their 3 and 4 month TD offers.

BIOSECURITY ALERT
The Ministry for Primary Industries is investigating a find of a single male Queensland fruit fly in a surveillance trap in the Auckland suburb of Grey Lynn. MPI has placed legal controls on the movement of fruit and some vegetables outside of a defined circular area which extends 1.5km from where the fly was trapped in Grey Lynn. The Controlled Area takes in parts of Grey Lynn, Western Springs, Mt Albert, Ponsonby and Kingsland.

CHECKING THE BUILDERS
The Government has announced a program to check the remediation standards of repaired Christchurch quake homes. A sample of 100 houses will be intensively reviewed first.

LESS SALES, HIGHER PRICES
Farm sales in January were at modest levels with 100 transactions in the month, -27% less than the same month a year ago, but about the average over the previous four years. There were only 15 dairy farm sales in January at a median price per hectare of $40,742. That price is +12% higher than the same month a year ago.

LESS LIFESTYLE
Lifestyle block sales have fallen away quite noticeably, except perhaps in Auckland. Canterbury fires in these blocks may be off-putting.

BORROW AND BUY
Home loan approvals are picking up again. There was $1.3 bln of approvals last week over 6,416 loans giving an average loan approval of $202,600 and back to levels we saw in the October and November period last year. 

LOOKING UP
Dairy prices rose more than +10% in today's dairy auction which goes about two thirds of the way to ensuring the Fonterra $4.70/kgMS payout can be maintained. Analysts are starting to raise their expectations for a higher payout next year because the trend is expected to continue. One thing that may underpin this is that the EU one year ban on dairy sales to Russia will expire soon.

TRUSTEE CONCENTRATION
The owner of Perpetual Guardian Trustee services is buying Covenant Trustee.

WHOLESALE RATES RISE
Our wholesale swap rates resumed climbing today, gaining +2 to +6 bps across the curve. This responds to rising benchmark rates on Wall Street overnight. The 90 day bank bill rate did not follow and is still at 3.62%.

NZ DOLLAR CONSOLIDATES
Check our real-time charts here. There has been a very slight firming of our exchange rate today following the jump in dairy prices - but certainly no buzz or froth (over and above the existing heady heights). We are now at 75.4 USc, at 96.4 AUc , and the TWI is at 78.6.

You can now see an animation of this chart. Click on it, or click here.