The headlines make you want to pick up the phone and call your loan officer to get this super low rate offered. In this article on Zillow Blog titled 30 Year Fixed Mortgage Rates Fall Below 4 Percent is pretty compelling right? The fact is that this is an average of rates taken from what appears to lead us to believe that the actual rate is 3.96% down from an actual rate of 4.06% the previous week. There are 2 very big problems with this however that will leave you feeling confused.
First, those are averages taken from what appears to be “Quotes on Zillow Mortgages”. So it’s unclear; are these actual locked in applications or are these actually just advertiser quotes being averaged? Regardless of which it is, the data or statistics is are extremely biased. If they are actual Zillow Mortgage Applications, they are taken only from a website that has advertisers publishing the lowest rates available to mankind and even if they locked those rates in, there’s no way to know if the applicants actually will close those loans or if they were even approved or locked. While this would be the case for any and all advertised rates, the fact that these are exclusively quoted from Zillow, which exists by selling advertising, it’s not a good cross sample of rates being offered by lenders to everyone. Now if they are in deed just quotes being advertised to the public, even worse! You can almost rest assured that those rates are being quoted with assumptions about credit and loan to value that most clients don’t actually have. A 30 year fixed for example at 30% Loan To Value with an 835 FICO score is pretty unrealistic, but there is still a faint possibility so they can publish it.
The other problem w/these averages is that they don’t quote the cost or discount points associated with these interest rates. They don’t even show the Annual Percentage Rate (APR) which shows that there is some cost being associated for that interest rate. I’m not a huge fan of the APR calculation as it allows various lenders to skew those numbers as well based on including or omitting certain costs from the calculation to make it appear lower. It can be quite confusing at times and if you were to have 5 different underwriters take the same file independently and disclose the APR, you’d probably find them to all have some variation. This isn’t on purpose, it’s because its a calculation that you have to manually determine what should be included. While APR calculations are required, I think a much better way to compare rates is to simply state what the points are for a particular rate. I rarely see an article or blog post that does that though. Read the Article for yourself at http://www.zillow.com/blog/mortgage-rates-below-4-percent-2-2-161520/ Are you curious now about what 30 year rate you might qualify for? Pick up the phone and call Chris Reese, the California Mortgage Hero & Certified Mortgage Planner at 916-502-1656 or inquire online at http://www.sacramentohomeloanspecialist.com/forms/rateTracker.html
30-Year Fixed Mortgage Rates Fall Below 4 Percent
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