No doubt you’ve heard that mortgage rates are low. They’re lower than they’ve ever been in history. The news is everywhere. But the low rate environment looks like it’s ending.
Conforming mortgage rates may be posting all-time lows this week, but that doesn’t mean you’ll be eligible for them. You may have already called your loan officer and found this out the hard way. It’s because of a federally-mandated mortgage-pricing scheme known as “loan-level pricing adjustments”.
Mortgage rates move in response to hundreds of factors. Among the biggest influences on mortgage rates? Inflation.
Mortgage rates may be dropping, but mortgage costs are not. According to Freddie Mac, the average required discount points on a conforming mortgage rate are higher by 0.1 percent since early-May.
Mortgage rates are low and they likely won’t stay that way. If you’ve been thinking about a refinance, talk to your loan officer as soon as possible.
Shopping for mortgage rates takes more than good research skills. It takes a little bit of luck, too.
Volcanic eruptions and like natural disasters remind us: mortgage rates change for all sorts of reasons. Some we can predict, most we cannot. There’s literally thousands of influences on the U.S. mortgage market. If you’ve been shopping for a home or floating a mortgage rate, luck’s been on your side.
Each week, government-led Freddie Mac publishes a weekly mortgage rate survey based on data from 125 banks across the country. According to this week’s results, the relative rate of a 5-year ARM is extremely low versus its 30-year fixed-rate cousin.
If you’re trying to gauge whether rates will be rising or falling, one keyword for which to listen is “inflation”. Mortgage rates are highly responsive to inflation.
Although the newspapers reported mortgage rates down last week, they weren’t. Conforming mortgage rates were higher by at least 1/8 percent, or roughly $11 per $100,000 borrowed per month. In some cases, rates were up by even more.
