Mortgage rates dropped again this week. According to a Freddie Mac survey, the further uncertainty in Europe pushes the average home mortgage rate for a thirty-year mortgage to 4.84%. Home loan rates continued to fall toward record lows this week as fallout from the European debt crisis. The flat inflation also helped keep rates intact and American borrowers will continue to have affordable financing opportunities for home buying or home refinancing. Investor flight to the safety of U.S. government securities has pushed yields down on Treasury bonds. And mortgage interest rates have followed, with lending companies offering an average interest rate of 4.84% on 30-year fixed-rate home loans, mortgage giant Freddie Mac reported Thursday. That was down from 4.93% a week earlier and the lowest average rate since December.
The mortgage lenders surveyed by Freddie Mac this week were offering 4.24% on average for fixed-rate, 15-year home loans. That’s the lowest level at least as far back as August 1991, when Freddie Mac began tracking rates on 15-year loans. For both thirty-year and fifteen-year home loans, lenders were charging upfront fees equal to 0.7% of the amount borrowed. Home loan rates also have been pushed down by a U.S. inflation rate that the government said Wednesday had dropped to a 44-year low of about 1% over the last year. The low mortgage rates, a stabilization of home prices and the federal government’s temporary home buyer tax credits have reinvigorated business for Laguna Niguel loan broker Jeff Lazerson, who said he had “one foot in the mortgage broker graveyard” for most of the first quarter of this year. “My business is back from the dead,” he said, adding that the expiration of the tax credits at the end of April hadn’t dampened business.
The Freddie Mac survey asks mortgage lenders the home mortgage rates they are offering to well-qualified buyers able to make at least a 20% down payment or who have 20% equity in their homes if they are mortgage refinancing. The article was written by Scott Reckard for the LA Times.
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