And they aren't just helping people buy houses. When mortgage rates dip, as they often do when the economy weakens, just about everybody in the mortgage-loan business spends lots of time giving advice to homeowners about refinancing their home loans. But just like investors seeking to time the stock market perfectly and buy when, say, Intel or Microsoft hits bottom, homeowners can outguess themselves on when to refinance. As with stock prices, the mortgage market's bottom is visible only in hindsight. A lot of people want rates in the 6's with no points for a 30-year fixed.
Economic weakness tends to drive mortgage rates down, and recent months have been no exception.
Since then, the trend has been, well, hard to call a trend. Rates have climbed a little, dipped a little, climbed a little, dipped a little. In the last month, they have been slowly climbing again - to a national average of 7.14 percent on April 19, though they dipped slightly to 7.12 percent last week, according to the most recent survey by Freddie Mac, the company chartered by Congress 31 years ago to help stabilize the mortgage market. As a result, refinancing has boomed. In recent months, roughly half of mortgage applications have come from people wanting to replace higher-rate mortgages, said Robert Van Order, Freddie Mac's chief economist.