What about Mortgage Rates?

Mortgage rates in Portland have crept up since January. The Iran war and the inflation it created are a huge part of that, 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.Today’s 30‑year fixed is sitting around 6.66%, and if you look back to when rates started climbing after COVID, that puts us pretty much in the middle of the “rate bandwidth” — not at the top. Over the last year and a half, we’ve mostly bounced between the mid‑6s on the low end and upper‑6s on the high end. Today is basically right in that same spot..

At the same time, the housing market itself — especially The housing market 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, especially since the expectation is that rates will hang out in this bandwidth for at least another 12–18 months - and there's absolutely little to no chance that interest rates will ever fall back into the COVID-era pandemic window. So, 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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