August 9, 2024
Buying a home – may be getting a little bit easier – let’s not get wild here – I’m just saying a little easier
That’s because mortgage rates just fell to the lowest level we’ve seen in more than a year. Freddie Mac just reported the average mortgage rate for the most popular mortgage in the US – the 30-year fixed – hit 6.47% this week. That’s the lowest rate we’ve seen in more than a year. Freddie Mac says this decrease has also resulted in a 42% spike in existing homeowners refinancing their mortgages.
So here’s the chart for the last three years…so you can see the trend. There you can see the 6.47% rate for the week ending August 8.
The last time we saw a rate this low was in May of 2023 when the 30-year fixed rate was 6.39%. Obviously today’s rate is still much, much higher compared to where we were back in August of 2021 when the 30-year fixed rate was 2.77%. But it’s definitely down from the peak we saw in October of 2023 when the rate hit 7.79%. For the last few weeks these rates have been steadily going down.
And I know you’re going to ask what was the rate under former president trump, you can see here on the 10 year chart – it ranged anywhere between 2.6% and just shy of 5%.
So why are rates going down now? Freddie Mac says because of the “likely overaction to a less than favorable employment report and financial market turbulence for an economy that remains on solid footing.” That’s a fancy way of saying – investors freaked out for no real reason and caused that market tank on Monday I told you in this video. I told you on Monday one of the biggest reasons for that market “crash’ in the United States was a reaction to a recent employment report that found employers added 114-thousand jobs in the month of July instead of the 200,000 or so we’ve been seeing. The report also found the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.3%. Which is still relatively low. Freddie Mac is basically saying investors took that report and freaked out thinking the economy was going to crash and started pulling money out of the market. But here we all are and the market hasn’t crashed the Dow has recovered most of the losses from Monday. Of course that can always change…but that’s the situation today.
Read more from Freddie Mac here.
