What about Mortgage Rates?

Mortgage rates in Portland have climbed more than a full point since January, and it’s led to uncertainty. A lot of our clients are asking the same question right now: “Is this a good time or a bad time to be buying a home?”

Unless somebody is paying cash for a home, the primary driver of the decision is: what are interest rates and what's my payment going to be? With that in mind, we always try to answer that by looking at the actual data, not the headlines. Freddie Mac’s weekly average for a 30‑year fixed was 7.40% for the week of October 15, 2026. If you look back to when rates started climbing after COVID, that puts us near the top of the “rate bandwidth” now, not in the middle, though still under the 2023 high of about 7.8%. For most of the last year and a half, we bounced between about 6% and 7%, and rates only broke above 7% in late September.

At the same time, the housing market itself, especially here in Portland, Oregon, is way more stable than it was in 2021–2022. If you'll remember back then, there was so much competition, you had to offer over the asking price, you were waiving inspections, and you had to promise that you would come up with the cash for any gap between the price and the appraised value. Fast forward to today, and sellers are considerably more open to negotiating on the price, as well as closing cost credits and repairs.

So if you’ve been waiting because “rates are too high,” it might be time to rethink that. Getting into the right house, at the right price with a solid plan, usually matters more than trying to time the ‘perfect rate’. And if things improve down the road, you can always look at refinancing.

If you want to talk through what this looks like for your budget and goals, reach out.

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