Home buyers are looking for ways to whittle down their mortgage rates. As a result, a once-popular home-selling tactic is making a comeback. It’s called a temporary buydown, and it was widely used when mortgage rates were zooming upward in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The revival of the temporary buydown is timely, as…
As mortgage rates continue their stomach-turning rise and serious shoppers compete for a limited supply of homes, would-be home buyers may be struggling to make a successful offer before their mortgage preapproval letter expires. According to Zillow, more than half of home buyers this year reported making two or more offers before closing on a home —…
Mortgage rates won’t change much in August, but they’re more likely to edge down than to go up. I wouldn’t be surprised if the average rate on the 30-year fixed dips to 2.75% annual percentage rate at some point in August. The monthly average should end up somewhere between 2.8% and 2.9%. The COVID-19 pandemic…
As you browse homes for sale online, digital slideshows dish out equal helpings of information and frustration. Every photo frames what the seller wants you to see. Want to shift your gaze to the right and inspect that shower head? Tough. But now you can virtually walk inside a home and look up, down, left…
Mortgage rates will remain low in 2020, affordable homes for sale will remain scarce, and boomers will remain in their homes and build equity that they won’t borrow from. But not everything in 2020 will be a continuation of 2019: People shopping for FHA loans might find more lenders competing for their business, and change…
The first half of 2019 surprised housing markets across the country: Mortgage rates fell. That’s the opposite of what the experts had predicted at the beginning of the year, and it’s welcome news for home buyers, sellers and homeowners. Millions of owners could benefit from refinancing at these unexpectedly lower rates. In other ways, housing…
Cities in the Pacific time zone have the least-affordable housing in the country, and the Central time zone has the most-affordable housing. Each quarter, NerdWallet calculates the home affordability for 178 metropolitan areas, matching the list of metros for which the National Association of Realtors publishes median home prices. This quarter, NerdWallet sorted the metro…
It’s going to be a challenging year for home buyers in 2019: They will continue to compete for a short supply of homes. Home prices and mortgage rates are likely to keep moving upward, bruising affordability. But 2019 is likely to bring some welcome developments, too, for buyers and mortgage borrowers. Builders are constructing more…
