Hey, guys! Remember me? Your faithful PMMS pal before I was replaced by a much more handsome and talented reporter named Travis? As I type this, Travis is traveling to the great Mount Ratemore on a vision quest to learn all that he can from the great mortgage rate masters. (Ha! You thought I forgot about that didn’t you? NO! Mount Ratemore lives again!)
At any rate, I agreed to step in for him while he’s gone so that no PMMS report goes unpublished. Neither rain nor snow nor sleet nor vision quests will keep you faithful readers from receiving your mortgage news!
So without further adieu, I present to you this week’s Primary Mortgage Market Survey.
30-year fixed-rate mortgages dropped slightly to 3.93% with an average of .8 points, down from last week when it averaged 3.98%. Last year at this time, the 30-year fixed-rate averaged 3.66%.
15-year fixed-rate mortgages also dropped this week to 3.04% with an average of 0.7 points, up from last week when it avaraged 3.10%. Last year, the 15-year rate averaged 2.95%.
The 5-year ARM stayed the same as last week, averaging at 2.79% with an average of .4 points.
The 1-year ARM dropped to 2.57% this week with an average 0.4 points. A year ago the 5-year ARM and the 1-year ARM averaged 2.77% and 2.74%, respectively.
And now a word from Frank Nothaft, vice president and chief economist of Freddie Mac:
“Mortgage rates were relatively unchanged this week as market participants awaited the Federal Reserve’s (Fed) monetary policy announcement. The Fed stated that economic growth has been expanding at a moderate pace and that labor market conditions have shown further improvement, although the unemployment rate remains elevated. It noted inflation has been running below the Fed’s longer-run objective as well. As a result, the Fed will continue its bond-buying program at the current pace and maintain its highly accommodative monetary policy stance.
“The Fed also affirmed that the housing sector has strengthened further. For instance, single-family housing permits increased nearly 2 percentage points in May to an annualized pace of 649,000 homes, the most since May 2008. In addition, homebuilder confidence in June rose to its highest reading since March 2006.”
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