Q1 2023 Housing Mortgage Update

We have Marty Wallace, a loan officer with First Home Mortgage as our special guest for this Maryland market update. . First Home Mortgage has been a great mortgage resource for us and our clients and we thought it would be great to have him join us to talk to discuss where interest rates have gone the first part of this year where you and an outlook on where we see them ending up. I think everybody's curious with that because they're so volatile right now and doesn't seem to be stability at all on that front with where rates have.

Since the beginning of 2023 most people know what happened last year. We saw the sharpest increase in rates in the history of mortgage backed rates in the period in the early parts of last year. With that being said, they have trended upwards all through 2022. We saw it soften up towards the tail end of the year and then a little bit softer into 2023. Until that really happened, they remained relatively steady. We saw a little bit of a decline after the most recent Fed meeting in January, where instead of kicking it up their usual 75 basis points, they actually onlyKicked it up 25. With them not increasing the overall Fed rate as high as they have been, that shows that inflation is starting to come down a little bit.

"Freddie Mac has the 30 year national rate around 6.66 as of March."

That's where the market is right now.  There's a lot of opinions or a lot of ideas of where things can go, and there's a lot of different factors that can buy into and pay dividends as to where rates will actually go.There's things that are unforeseen, too, like socioeconomically. You can consider what's going on in Ukraine that can impact things or the train derailment as additional factors that can impact indirectly mortgage rates in our Maryland real estate market.

We know you don't have a crystal ball, but if you were to guess, are we staying stable, are we increasing, are we decreasing over the next six to twelve months?

Based off of where the market has been over the past couple of years and quite frankly, over the past, call it 10-12 years after the 2008 when things started to kind of calm down on 2010 and thereafterwards, I would say optimistically, we are leveling out. I don't anticipate rates to necessarily drop in the next six months on the early side, 18 months on the longer side. I think that we'll kind of find our footing just because in addition to interest rates, the low inventory is one of the main reasons why rates haven't dropped. Simply because if you lower the rates, that's going to flood the market with all the pent up buyers.

Watch the video for more info, or check out our previous blog that ties right back into us discussing how we are now back to a normal necessity based selling cycle versus an opportunity based real estate market.