Long-term 15- and 30-year fixed-rate mortgage rates jumped to six- and seven-year highs, government-backed mortgager Freddie Mac said in a statement on Thursday.
Conventional 30-year rates peaked at 4.86 percent, up from last week’s average of 4.81 percent, while 15-year rates jumped 0.05 percent from last week’s 4.15 percent to 4.20 percent.
“Interest rates on fixed mortgages … rose slightly over the holiday week, but were still below the year’s highs set in the first half of 2010,” Frank Nothaft, vice president and chief economist of Freddie Mac, said in the statement.
“Even so, mortgage rates remain incredibly low,” the Freddie Mac release said.
The uptick in mortgage rates comes as government regulators announced that home foreclosures soared in the third quarter of 2010 and a realtor trade group publicized that pending home sales were rosy.
According to a previous Epoch Times report citing Treasury’s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS), home foreclosures leapt by 31 percent from Q2 2010 to Q3 2010.
Despite the gloomy state of depressed properties, the overall outlook for pending home sales has improved.
The National Association of Realtor’s (NAR) Pending Home Sales Index grew 3.5 percent in November, marking what NAR chief economist Lawrence Yun has said was “exceptional affordability conditions” and prompting “steady improvements in the economy [that] are helping bring buyers into the market.
