Mortgage rates made little movement this week amidst the backdrop of a Federal Reserve meeting and a sluggish housing market. A stock sell-off and a barrage of back-and-forth over executive orders likewise didn’t impress rates much.
The average rate on the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage fell two basis points to 6.92% the week ending Jan. 30, according to rates provided to NerdWallet by Zillow. A basis point is one one-hundredth of a percentage point. Overall, January’s high and low points for the 30-year were less than one-third of a percentage point apart; mortgage rates simply haven’t moved much so far this year.
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No Fed cut this time
On Wednesday Jan. 29, the Federal Reserve concluded its first meeting of the year with a widely expected announcement that it would hold the federal funds rate steady. Mortgage interest rates didn’t react to that news, but then again, mortgage rates also didn’t drop when the Fed cut rates three times starting in September of last year. Over that same period, as the Fed dropped the funds rate a total of one percentage point, mortgage rates went up roughly the same amount, moving from near 6% in mid-September to over 7% earlier this month.
Questioned on this during Wednesday’s post-announcement press conference, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell noted, “we control an overnight rate” — the federal funds rate that the Fed adjusts is the interest rate banks charge each other for short-term lending. “Generally it propagates through the whole family of asset prices, including interest rates,” Powell continued. “In this particular case it happened at a time when, for reasons unrelated to our policy, longer-term rates have moved up.”
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Housing market faces hurdles
Those unrelated reasons include housing market conditions, which haven’t been giving mortgage lenders much room to lower rates. The National Association of Realtors’ latest numbers on existing home sales, released on Jan. 24, gave a bleak summation of last year’s housing market. The number of sales of existing homes in 2024 was 4.06 million, the lowest since 1995. At the same time, the median existing-home sale price hit a record high of $407,500.
In a briefing covering the data release, NAR chief economist Lawrence Yun struck a more optimistic tone. Yun noted that while prices have risen, the median price reflects a market where more celeb-level villas are selling than starter homes. Yun also highlighted December 2024’s strong performance, with home sales up 9.3% year over year.
“As we are getting more inventory, more transactions [are] coming,” said Yun, “and as we think about what’s going to happen in 2025, I don’t see that home sales can remain this slow.” If mortgage interest rates can manage to go a bit lower this year, that could definitely give the market some gas.
