Good news for buyers: it’s a great time to get a mortgage. Today’s 30-year fixed rate mortgage is 2 percentage points lower than the average over the last 25 years. According to Bankrate.com’s weekly national survey [1], 30-year fixed mortgages rates remain at the lowest level in seven months.
According to Bankrate.com, Fannie Mae plans to relax banks lending standards in late July, which means more people will qualify for mortgages. Qualified borrowers will then be able to claim half of their pretax income to their monthly debt payments, including their household payments. As it stands now, in most cases Fannie limits total debt payments to 45 percent of borrowers’ income.
Bankrate.com reported the benchmark 30-year fixed rate mortgage fell this week to 4.02 percent from 4.04 percent. This was 4.15 percent three weeks ago and 3.69 percent a year ago. Mortgages in the last week had an average total of 0.24 discount and origination points.
Over the past 52 weeks, Bankrate reported 30-year fixed has average 3.97 percent and this weeks rate is 0.05 percent higher than the 52-week average. 15-year fixed rate rose to 25 percent from 3.24 percent. The 5/1 adjustable-rate mortgage rose to 42 percent from 3.4 percent and 30-year fixed-rate jumbo mortgage rose to 4 percent from 3.99 percent.
Freddie Mac reported in their weekly survey [2] that 30-year mortgage rate rose 2 basis points over the week to 3.91 percent. Freddie’s report, however, was conducted before investors drove Treasury yields sharply lower in a reaction to the weak CPI release. Freddie Mac said if that drop in yield sticks, mortgage rates are likely to follow in next week’s survey.
According to Freddie Mac, 15-year fixed-rate mortgages averaged 3.18 percent with an average 0.5 point, up from last week when it averaged 3.16 percent. 5-year Treasury-indexed hybrid adjustable-rate mortgage averaged 3.15 percent this week with an average 0.5 point, up from last week when it averaged 3.11 percent.