by Roberta Murphy
The San Diego real estate market is red hot, and we can’t help but wonder if increased mortgage rates might cool things down a bit?
That would be great news for investors, but a struggle for some home buyers. It seems the Mortgage Bankers Association, Fannie Mae and our own National Association of Realtors are forecasting 30-year mortgage rates to meet or beat 4% by the end of 2013.
What difference would that make to a San Diego home buyer? The folks at the KCM Blog have created a terrific visual, which you see at left and which shows the added cost a rate increase would have on various mortgage amounts.
The rise might seem like a steep one, but I’m a real estate veteran who can recall mortgage rates that exceeded 18%–or even more. And it was markets like that that gave rise to creative financing and ways to buy and sell real estate.
We’re a long way from those rates, though!