Mortgage interest rates remain flat

Mortgage interest rates for buying a home on the Palos Verdes Peninsula stayed steady this week. The following are excerpts from the newsletter on interest rates published by HSH Associates :

" You probably wouldn't know it, given all the "rising mortgage rates" headlines of the spring, but the reality is that mortgage rates have been fairly stable now for weeks. In fact, that's been much the case overall since the end of April, when they cruised past the 4.5 percent mark. In the nine-week period since then, 30-year FRMs have held in just a 12-basis point slot with about as many weeks of decline as increase, and that despite an active Fed and faster economic growth and inflation.

Although it's rather too soon to call it, but as we're now at the start of summer, there seems a good chance that the summer doldrums for rates may start early this year.

For reasons hard to reckon, it just feels to us as though the factors that drove mortgage rates higher in the early part of the year faded to some degree in the last couple of months and continue to wane at the moment. This isn't to suggest that mortgage rates are likely to fall; on the contrary, they are still much more likely to rise than decline, but there just doesn't seem to be the same degree of upward pressure at the moment as there was in January, or March, or even May, for that matter. It simply feels as though a directionless period for rates has formed, and it isn't clear what might cause a break higher if current influences can't seem to make that happen.

As such, we think that rates will only wobble in place next week, with the average conforming 30-year FRM reported by Freddie Mac moving probably just a basis point or two, probably up."

The following are interest rate quotes from John Alvin of American California Financial: