Mortgage rates tick down as US housing inventory recovers
US mortgage rates saw slight pullbacks this past week, according to data out from Freddie Mac, the 30-year fixed rate mortgage ticking down to 6.85% while the 15-year rate moved back to 5.99%. These are the first declines in several weeks.
Yahoo Finance housing reporter Claire Boston weighs in on how rates appear in limbo and remain in these general ranges throughout 2025, while also commenting on data pointing to a recovery in US housing inventories.
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00:00 Brad
Mortgage rates for the week ending June 5th are out. Yahoo Finance's Claire Boston joins me now with the numbers. What do we got?
00:07 Claire
Hi, Brad. The 30-year mortgage rate this week is 6.85%. That is down just a bit from 6.89% a week ago. 15-year mortgage rates are 5.99%, and that is down a bit from 6.03% a week ago. Now, these are very small declines. They are the first declines we've seen in many weeks, but it's honestly not really moving the needle at all when we talk about mortgage rate affordability. We've really been stuck range bound in this sort of 6.7% to 6.9% for pretty much all of this year.
00:41 Brad
We got a comment here from the chief economist over at Freddie Mac who says that the average mortgage rate decreased this week, which is welcome news to potential home buyers who are also seeing inventory improve, house price, house price growth slow as well here. That's from Sam Cater, Freddie Mac's chief economist. There are more homes on the market right now according to realtor.com's May monthly housing trends report. The number of homes for sale in the US topped 1 million for the first time since 2019. Walk us through some of the findings there.
01:12 Claire
Yes, so it's quite interesting. Overall inventory is up about 30%, and we've crossed this key, you know, 1 million threshold for the first time in many years. That being said, when you look at that number, it's still around 14% lower than the pre-pandemic levels. So we've made really big strides on inventory, but we're not all the way there yet. And also, when you look geographically, where these homes for sale are, there is more inventory than we've ever had before in the South, in the Midwest. Uh but then, or sorry, the South and the um, the West. But the Midwest and the Northeast, there still are very few homes for sale. So it's kind of really a tale of a bunch of different markets here.
02:01 Brad
All right, just to recap the numbers, 30-year fixed rate mortgage averaging 6.85%. 15-year fixed rate mortgage, 5.99%. Claire, thanks so much.
02:13 Claire
Thank you.
