Bob Lipply, who sells Tampa Real Estate, believes that there is good news for new homebuyers as prices and financing options on homes will remain extremely affordable. While there appeared to be a sizeable recovery in the housing market taking place, it was later attributed to buyers securing the homebuyer tax credit before the April 30th deadline. Following the short-lived “recovery”, demand for home loans plunged to a 13-year low. However, analysts including Freddie Mac chief economist Frank Nothaft believe that this is a temporary decline, admitting that expectations for growth were higher for the first three months of the year. Though the housing market has shown signs of being on the right path to recovery, it will be a slow one with inflation being relatively docile.
Figures recently released by Freddie Mac show that mortgage rates are teetering at record lows, even amidst an unstable U.S. bond market, with 30-year fixed mortgages averaging 4.79 percent for the week ending June 3, up 0.01 percentage points from the prior week but half a point lower than last year. This is not far off of the all-time low of 4.71 percent reached this past December, proving that 30-year rates have remained mostly unaffected. Equally, 15-year fixed-rate mortgages have shown new record lows reaching 4.20 percent, which is considerably lower than the 4.79 percent average of the previous year. Freddie Mac has been tracking 15-year rates since 1991 and 30-year rates since 1971.