Mortgage rates under 7% as housing leans into buyer’s market

00:00 Ali

Mortgage rates for the week ending June 12th are out. Yahoo! Finance’s Claire Boston joins me now with the numbers. So, any relief?

00:08 Claire Boston

Hey Ali, really no relief this week. The 30-year mortgage rate is at 6.84% this week. That is down from 6.85%, so essentially flat. 15-year mortgage rates drifted a tiny bit lower to 5.97%. Still not a lot. It was 5.99% last week. So, you know, this is a flat report for all intents and purposes. And it’s the latest evidence that we are really stuck in this high 6% area, which is just a tough environment for affordability for a lot of people. At the same time though, we saw pretty good mortgage application data this week. So that suggests to me that, you know, some buyers are just saying, I see rates are staying flat and I’m going to go ahead with my purchase, even though it’s pretty tough out there.

00:56 Ali

I guess flat is always better than. Exactly. Now, there are signs that could be shifting to a buyer’s market with just 28% of homes selling above asking price. So walk us through the data there.

01:14 Claire Boston

Yes, so this is from a new report from Redfin and that 28% report is actually the smallest number of homes selling for above asking since 2020 and we all know what happened in 2020. Pandemic, housing market was basically shut down. So, that does suggest that buyers have a little bit more room to negotiate in a lot of these markets. Sellers are, you know, willing to cut prices, they are willing to do seller’s credits. Um, you know, again, affordability overall is still really really challenged, but buyers are making inroads in most places.

01:46 Ali

Interesting. So it seems to be a buyers market at this point. With the Fed potentially cutting interest rates later this year, is that something that buyers should consider when they’re choosing whether or not to go ahead and purchase a home?

02:01 Claire Boston

Yeah, so mortgage rates are kind of interesting because they do not directly have anything to do with the Fed, but um, you know, what the Fed does in the future does affect rates. So if the market thinks that the Fed is going to cut, that could cause mortgage rates to drift lower. That being said, we haven’t seen a lot of that of yet.

02:23 Ali

Right, Claire, thank you so much. Always keeping track of those mortgage rates even though we don’t have a lot of relief just yet.

02:30 Claire Boston

Appreciate it.