Newsfeed: ‘The real mortgage rate is a negative number.’ As inflation stubbornly remains high, do current mortgage rates look better than they seem?
I write about mortgage rates every week, but recently, I’ve heard some sources chattering about what’s called the “real mortgage rate.” In a nutshell, this is the interest rate on mortgages minus the current inflation rate. “With inflation running so high right now, even though mortgage rates have risen, the real mortgage rate is a negative number,” says Kate Wood, home expert at NerdWallet. When the CPI was at 9.1%, for example, “if you had a mortgage with a 5% interest rate, your real mortgage rate is -4.1%,” she says. (See the lowest mortgage rates you can get here.)
