Navigating Interest Rate Hikes in Brunswick County – Part 1

Hello and welcome, this is Nolan with Discover NC Homes and Nolan’s News, and we’re going to talk about a topic that you may have just gotten sick of me talking about, which is interest rates. They are constantly moving, constantly fluctuating and always affecting our marketplace. So right now for the month of, let’s say November and definitely December, our average rate on a 30 year fixed is 7.25%, okay? 24 – 28 months ago, that same rate would have been 5.25%. Now you can spend some money and buy down the rate, but just for the sake of kind of talking through these numbers, we’re going to say that folks aren’t doing that. So a price point of, let’s say a half a million dollars, purchase price of $500,000, the difference between 5.25% and 7.25% is a $500 a month payment increase. So, it’s a big increase from just 24 – 28 months ago. If you bump that up to an $800,000 purchase, between 5.25% and 7.25%, that’s going to be a $750 a month increase in payment. So, we’re not just talking smaller numbers in a monthly payment. These are big numbers.

Prices have not yet stabilized in our, I’m going to say $300,000 to $800,000 range, and then the lower end of that range, that $300,000 to $400,000, we’re actually still seeing price increases. So you now have a higher interest rate coupled with a market that still hasn’t stabilized yet. We’re still seeing, which is not a bad thing, but it is a bad thing for buyers, we’re still seeing a little bit of a hike in prices.

So, now let’s look back three to four years ago. You were at an average interest rate of maybe 3%-4%. And prices were a lot lower than they were, or are now. So our market is slowing down because of the combination of all of these things. And in the next little segment piece I want to talk about specifically prices, but you know, we are still in a very good market, but we are starting to see the stabilize and starting to see the slowdown because this is a pretty big rate increase.

So more to come on the next video, we always have wonderful lenders we work with that have great ideas and also buy down rates and creative things to do to get your monthly payment down, so please reach out, contact us if you have any questions. Thank you so much.

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