NEW YORK — The monthly bill on a $400,000 mortgage did not rise this week, but it did not fall either, and it now sits about $301 above where it stood a year ago.
Freddie Mac said Thursday that the average 30-year fixed rate was 7.40 percent, unchanged from last week and up from 6.27 percent a year earlier. That is the highest level since Nov. 16, 2023, when the average was 7.44 percent, and it ends seven consecutive weekly increases. In July, when mortgage rates hit an 11-month high at 6.55 percent, the average sat 85 basis points lower.
Freddie Mac’s release offered one sentence of explanation: the average “remained unchanged this week.” It did not say why the climb stopped or whether it will resume. The $301 figure is TEH’s arithmetic, not Freddie Mac’s, and covers principal and interest alone on a 30-year, $400,000 loan at 7.40 percent against 6.27 percent, before taxes and insurance.
A pause at this level is not relief. Mortgage rates tend to follow the 10-year Treasury yield, which was 5.19 percent on Wednesday, down from 5.31 percent on Oct. 5, according to Treasury Department data. Freddie Mac’s weekly figure averages applications from the prior Thursday through Wednesday, so it trails the bond market by days.
For buyers, the pressure shows up in negotiation more than in volume. Fortune reported Redfin data showing sellers outnumbered buyers by 58 percent in August, the widest gap in the brokerage’s records dating to 2013, and that 21.1 percent of sellers with active listings cut asking prices in the four weeks ending Sept. 20, against 19.8 percent a year earlier.
Not everyone reads that as a buyer’s market. Lisa Sturtevant, chief economist at Bright MLS, told Fortune she would not call it one, because inventory is “still very tight, and prices remain near record highs in many local markets.”
The pause also arrives weeks after the Fed raised rates in September, though lenders price mortgages off bond yields rather than the central bank’s overnight rate. Freddie Mac’s survey covers conventional purchase loans for borrowers with 20 percent down and good or excellent credit, so it describes the best-qualified buyers, not every buyer.
What neither Freddie Mac nor Redfin can say is how many of those price cuts are turning into closed sales at a rate this high.
