LEHI – Mortgage rates are now at their highest level in months.
Freddie Mac reported on Thursday that the average rate for a 30-year fixed mortgage rose to 6.46% just as the spring buying season gets underway.
Those rates had dipped recently below 6% to levels not seen since 2022 — until the war started in Iran. Now fewer people are applying for home loans, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association, and the typical mortgage payment is inching up, per a study from real estate company Redfin.
“Not a huge fan of rates going up,” said Braden Christensen, who lives in a condo in Lehi.
While on a walk Thursday evening with his 1-year-old son, Christensen told KSL he plans to sell his condo and buy a house somewhere in Utah County, ideally within the next year or so.
But he’s been watching mortgage rates rise.
“I was kind of hoping they might go down,” Christensen said. “I’ve kind of been waiting. But at a certain point, you just kind of have to pull the trigger and bite the bullet, I guess.”
Rick Anderton, a mortgage lender at Ridge Home Loans in Orem, said the last few weeks have been wild.
“We hit a four-year low (for mortgage rates) just over a month ago, and it was really crazy busy for a minute,” Anderton said.
But then, the U.S. and Israel launched a war with Iran.
“The rates jumped up a half percent to three-quarters of a percent within a couple weeks,” Anderton said. “I went from being as busy as I’ve been in four years to as slow as I’ve been in four years — all in two weeks.”
Buyers are sensitive to rates because higher rates mean higher mortgage payments.
“When people are already at their limit, that just pushes them out of the market,” Anderton said.
The Associated Press reports mortgage rates typically rise and fall with the 10-year Treasury yield, which has been increasing in tandem with soaring oil prices due to the war in Iran.
Christensen cited mortgage rates as one of the “main factors” in his homebuying decision-making.
“Hopefully rates come down,” he said. “I don’t really imagine it, though.”
Anderton, who has seen many ups and downs in the mortgage market since he started working in 2005, believes things will eventually improve.
“What goes up comes down,” he said, “but it doesn’t always come down as fast as we’d like it to.”
As mortgage rates increase, home prices in Utah also remain high. The statewide median sales price for all housing types — including single-family, townhomes, and condos — was around $515,000 in March, according to the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute at the University of Utah.
Yet, homes in Utah are also taking longer to sell than they did a year ago — 41 days on average, according to the Gardner Institute.
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