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Forbes Advisor
Would-be home buyers may finally get some relief on mortgage rates in 2024. With the Federal Reserve’s announcement that it will again leave its benchmark lending rate unchanged, the central bank has ended its two-year campaign of tightening credit and is expected to begin easing rates downward. “We do expect that [mortgage] rates will continue to tip down incrementally,” says Jessica Lautz, deputy chief economist and vice president of research at the National Association of Realtors®, or NAR. “By the spring of 2024…rates will hopefully be in the 6% range.” Most observers are expecting the Fed to begin cutting rates in the first half of 2024. Newly released projections by members of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) have the fed funds rate falling to an estimated 4.6% in 2024. That suggests the Fed will cut rates by 0.75 percentage points in total; the change could take the form of multiple rate cuts during the year. Lautz notes that a rate decrease doesn’t have to be big to be meaningful. Saving a few hundred dollars a month thanks to a lower mortgage rate “can be a game changer for some consumers,” she says.