It’s Buyer’s Week on the Greater Hartford Real Estate Blog. Yesterday we outlined the current opportunity for buyers, and today we’re talking mortgages. Check back each day this week for another post specifically for buyers. Unless you’re independently wealthy, the first step in buying a home is talking with a mortgage professional. They are the gatekeeper in the whole purchase process; checking credit, verifying income, and generally making sure that you are qualified to secure
Last week I wrote a post about trying to refinance our house. We’re well underway at this point and hope to close in the next 45 days or so, as long as everything goes as planned. All four lenders that I initially called responded quickly to the voicemails I left them. Three were brokers that have several banks available to them and one was a local credit union. They all said that they’re getting lots
The other day Kyle wrote a post about how low mortgage rates are right now. We’ve been kicking around the idea of refinancing for a while, and at this point think we’d like to move forward. This is an opportunity to lower our rate significantly. The big questions: 1. Is it worth it – how much of an impact will a lower rates have? For us, the attraction is paying less interest over the life
There was an interesting article in last week’s Wall Street Journal about the success a hedge fund is having in modifying mortgages and keeping homeowners in their homes. The point of the article was to highlight a successful private market example of mortgage modifications, in this case a distressed investment fund, as compared to the highly publicized Federal programs like the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP). A key difference between the hedge fund’s strategy and
Mortgage rates are currently low. Very low. It’s common for well qualified buyers to get rates below 5%, and we’ve heard of some rates as low as 4.25% on 30-year fixed mortgages with no points. We even saw a sign by the road advertising a 3.99% rate, though it was not clear what the other terms would be. Here’s a chart from Mortgage-X.com showing rates going back to 1963, which is further than other charts