Though mortgage rates had a slight uptick this week after a five-week lowering streak, it won’t have much effect on monthly payments according to Bankrate.com’s weekly survey [1]. The better question Bankrate is raising is, “why did rates go up and why didn’t they go up more?” For over a week, the hot topic has been the Federal Reserves decision to increase a key short-term interest rate and how they said it would trim it’s massive holdings of mortgage-backed securities and Treasury bonds with the intention of pushing up long-term rates.
"Low mortgage rates have been pretty resilient so far to the Fed's moves and that's been a positive for buyers, “said Danielle Hale, Managing Director of Housing Finance at the National Association of Realtors [2] told Bankrate. "
Len Kiefer, Deputy Chief Economist at Freddie Mac [3] told Bankrate that mortgage rates are just returning to pre-election trends, because the economy itself isn’t changing that much.
"It's really on the inflation and wage front, where we're not seeing a lot of movement, and relatively weak overall economic growth, but that's sort of the same story we've had over the past couple of years," Kiefer said.
This week, the benchmark 30-year fixed-rate mortgage rose from 4.02 percent to 4.05 percent. This time last year, the rate sat at 3.73 percent. The 30-year fixed-rate average is 0.39 percentage points below the 52-week high of 4.44 percent and is 0.53 percentage points above the 52-week low of 3.52 percent. At this current rate, buyers would pay $480.30 for every $100,000 you borrow, up from $478.57 last week according to Bankrate.
15-year fixed-rate mortgages rose to 3.27 percent from 3.25 percent. Currently, buyers would pay $703.64 for every $100,000, up from $702.67 last week.
The 5/1 adjustable-rate mortgage rose from 3.41 percent to 3.47 percent. At this rate, buyers would pay $447.37 for every $100,000 they borrow, up from last weeks $444.04.