Looking to buy? Mortgage rates are at record lows
There are all sorts of reasons to buy a home these days … as long as you don’t have to sell one at the same time.
Housing prices have dropped. Sellers are desperate, so desperate that they’re willing to compromise on everything from price to closing dates to the repairs they’ll agree to make before closing a transaction. Inventory levels are high, too, meaning that buyers have plenty of homes from which to choose.
Now, if you’re selling a house, too, that changes everything. Then you face the same challenges that all sellers face today. Those, basically, are the opposite of what I just wrote in the paragraph above this one.
Now there’s even more reason for buyers — at least those not saddled with a house of their own to sell — to buy: Mortgage interest rates are at their lowest levels ever. You can read about it in this story on the Web site of the Silicon Valley MercuryNews.
This wee, the average mortgage interest rate on a 30-year fixed-rate loan fell to 4.85 percent. That’s down from an already low 4.98 percent the week before. It’s also the lowest the rates have been since Freddie Mac, the government-backed mortgage financing company, has been recording mortgage interest rates. To give you some perspective, Freddie Mac has been recording the rates since 1971.
So if you want to buy a house, this truly is a great buyer’s market. You might worry about whether your home will rise in value after you buy it. It might not in the short time. It might even dip lower in value. But if you hold onto it for seven years or more, the odds are good your home will show solid appreciation.
Just don’t expect to buy a home on the cheap and then sell it one or two years later for big profit. That’s one of the things that got us into this housing crisis in the first place.
