Using Weekly Mortgage Rates to Your Advantage
Posted by David Schneider | December 27, 2007

Weekly mortgage rate analysis can help you determine many things about the types of loans that you can get on real estate. Perhaps most importantly, a good analysis can tell you what kind of rate you can expect to get on a mortgage. A good analysis might also tell you the difference between the average mortgage rates from this week, the week before and one year ago to the week. When you look at the weekly rates over a length of time, you can see the shifts in the mortgage rates during this time. This can often point toward what these rates will be like in the near future.

Changes in Housing Rates

When you’re buying real estate, you want to take out a mortgage when the rates are low. The lower the mortgage rates, the less money you will spend buying your property. When you look at the changes in the mortgage rates from week to week, you can predict the direction the market is heading. It’s impossible to be accurate 100 percent of the time, but many people can get a good idea of where the market is heading by looking at a weekly mortgage rate analysis. This is similar to making projections with the stock market. While it’s often easy to recognize the direction that mortgage rates are heading, knowing how long they will continue to head in that direction is not so easy to predict.

Small Changes Make Big Differences

Small differences in mortgage rates can make a big difference when you look at how much money you will spend in interest on a loan that lasts several years. Real estate is probably the most expensive purchase that you will ever make, which means that the interest on the mortgage can add up quickly. Let’s say that you have a 30-year mortgage with 6.5 percent interest rate on a $200,000 home. Your monthly payment for this mortgage will be $1,254.14. If you can use the weekly mortgage rate analysis to determine when the mortgage rate will be just .5 percent lower, your monthly payments will be $1,199.10. That’s a saving of over $50 every month, which comes to $660.48 per year. Over the course of this loan, you will save almost $20,000 just by finding an interest rate that is half a point lower.

Analyzing Weekly Mortgage Rates

When analyzing weekly mortgage rates, the rates of the top mortgage dealers are used. The amount of mortgage firms that are considered in the analysis depends on the company that is conducting the analysis. The more firms that the analyzer includes, the more accurate the average rates are. However, most mortgage brokers follow those that are at the top, so it doesn’t always make a large difference.

By using a weekly mortgage rate analysis, many people can determine when the best time for them to purchase real estate is. If you already have a mortgage and are thinking about refinancing, then you can also use the weekly rates to determine how much money, if any, you can save by refinancing at a certain time.