Interest Rates Dip This Week But for How Long?

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Interest Rate Dips This Week

Alice Lema: [00:00:00] Oh, good morning. Real estate fans, Alice Lema here, broker John L. Scott and beautiful Southern Oregon with another edition of the weekly podcast today. We're having kind of a surprising topic, interest rates dip down this week, but for how long and why. Yep. Caught me by surprise. Lots to unpack there.

Before we get to that, let's give you a quick second to give us the thumbs up. Subscribe to the channel, send questions and comments, share with your friends. That's what it's for. And if you wanna speak to me privately, you can text or call. This number up here, 541-301-7980. There's still a lot of opportunity in this bizarre housing climate for investing, buying, and selling.

So yeah, please reach out. Love to help you with your next real estate transaction. Okay, let's move on to interest rates, dip down this week. How long and why. So this is all so surprising and interesting. I'm in a house, the girls on the phone with her lender, cuz we're gonna write an offer and she goes, what do [00:01:00] you mean 4.8?

And I'm shaking my head. I'm going that's not right. I'm like waving my hands. That's not right. We confirm not only is it right, that's the new thing. So in her situation, her rate was actually gonna be more like low fives, but with a little bit of extra cash, that's called buying down the rate. Give a little more money to the lender. They give you a little lower interest rate. She was gonna get in the high fours. So we get outta the house. We write the offer. Everything's golden.

I'm on the horn instantly. All of my lenders and this is true. The interest rates have dipped down. Here's a chart from Freddie Mac, and this is a great website. And you can see that as of the printing of this chart, the interest rates that dipped down to 4.99. And if you're doing a 15 year mortgage or an arm, an adjustable rate mortgage, and that's a different podcast, there's there's snakes in that armpit, no pun intended. But the, the arms have a [00:02:00] place in some people's life and can be very dangerous in other people's lives.

But we'll talk about that another time, but I just wanna show you it's the trend right now is downward for the prices of borrowing money, which is amazing. So I'm telling people, walk, don't run, get your deals done and lock it in. But let's take a, a step further into this. Because there's some interesting pressures on the interest rates and they're not all logical.

So we've got a a little snippet here from one of the experts at nerd wallet. I love nerd wallet, and we're gonna post it here in the description. But basically they're saying and this is Holden Lewis, a home and mortgage expert at nerd wallet says downbeat economic news has been pressing mortgage rates lower in the past few weeks.

And this has happened despite the persistence of high inflation, a factor that tends to lift interest rates higher. So this is counterintuitive, right? We're all [00:03:00] thinking higher. And then they go lower. And that's what he's acknowledging that it's confusing and counterintuitive and not logical, but he's an expert.

So we'll, we'll just keep that in mind. Now here's another interesting comment, and this is bank rate.com. They have a weekly mortgage rate trend index, and they do surveys. Okay. So sit down for this one, cuz you're gonna wanna put your head in your hand. So 40% of the experts that bank rate.com surveyed for next week's interest rate prediction. They're just going one week into the future guys. One week into the future. 40% of the experts. In this bank rate.com survey, 40% said the interest rates are gonna go up. 30% said, they'll go down. And 30% said, they'll stay the same.

Well, there's no continuity there. I don't understand how we can have [00:04:00] static data and like all these different opinions. But here we are welcome to the wild world of real estate. Having said all that. There's still a lot of opportunity here. And I said it at the beginning, all this weird stuff, all these things happening in the world creates opportunity. And now we have like a gift from the universe. The rates are down. So I say, do it, sell your house right this second and be, and be aggressive in case the rates spike up again, there's so much volatility.

And some of the, and some of the lenders are different from each other with their pricing and the points and their services and stuff. So right now the online lenders are falling out of favor. In fact, some of them are really struggling. Some of the online more discount real estate companies are struggling.

And that is another podcast we will dip into probably next week, because you're gonna be shocked to hear who's doing massive layoffs and why. They're kind of big, big companies in the real estate market, [00:05:00] but not John L. Scott, John L. Scott's doing great in our local market here. In spite of all this turmoil, we're holding our own. But because of all this going on, the opportunities. Are right here right now. So not to sound like a salesperson, even though I am a salesperson, I like to be more a con a consultant. I wanna be here to give you info and then do what you tell me pretty much.

But the point is that we've got some amazing opportunities right now in listing, which, you know, we kind of didn't have the last month or so it was just brutal out there. A lot more competition, lot of price changes going downward. And the buyers kind of dragging their feet, in part cuz they couldn't afford what they could afford even 45 days ago. So lots of opportunity to list your house, lots of opportunity to purchase.

And the investment in Southern Oregon, if you're a landlord I think is gonna be there for a while, just because the pressure on the landlords to have a higher number of [00:06:00] laws to adhere to. And the financial pressures of being a landlord in the state of Oregon are higher than I think most, any other state in the union. And that creates a shortage of tenant housing that is one of the pressures that's creating a shortage of tenant housing.

So I still look at the investment market in Southern Oregon as great. And we do need, we do need good landlords. It's a great business. It doesn't matter how old you are, as long as you're over 18, you can own real estate and you can be a landlord. We've got lots of great education here in Southern Oregon for that.

So yeah, it's. It's hard to be a landlord, but I still think the investment opportunities are great here in Southern Oregon. Hopefully we'll have more landlords put the properties on the market this week. So that'll give more opportunity for buyers. In the meantime, Here we are. We've got our weekly numbers.

Jackson county, total active listings are up 61% from this time last year. And Jackson county closing [00:07:00] sales are down 50% from this time last year.

Josephine county active listings are up 48% this week from this week, last year and Josephine county closings are down 64%.

Klamath county active listings are neutral. Haven't seen that in a long time. I wonder if that's the beginning of a trend. We'll have to see. Klamath county total active listings are the same as they were this week, last year. And Klamath county closings, number of solds are down 51% from this time last year now that's just residential.

And I know it's micro slicing, but right now I'm going into the micro slicing data collection just to see if I can get an inkling of where we're going next, because I got caught by surprise by the interest rates going down this week. So that's it for this week. Give us a call 541-301-7980 give me a text, have a beautiful weekend hug. The ones you love. We'll see you next week. Bye [00:08:00] now.