Announcing the Zillow Mortgage Rate Monitor, and Other Mortgage Resources from Zillow

If you’re a regular visitor to Zillow.com, you’ve probably come across our Zillow Mortgage Marketplace, where lenders send out thousands of real rate quotes to anonymous borrowers every day. All of that activity provides us with a lot of data — namely, real mortgage rates, quoted in real time.

We know how difficult it is to keep up with the mortgage market these days. With the Fannie and Freddie takeover, and now a bailout that will surely have some effect on rates, it’s important to stay informed. So, in addition to the rate tables available on Zillow Mortgage Marketplace, where you can see mortgage rates by the day, week and month, we’ve started compiling a weekly average rate, and comparing it to the rate from a week before.

We look at rates quoted between Monday and Sunday, and will provide a weekly report on Tuesday. Here’s what we found this week:

Rates have remained relatively flat over the past week, with rates for 30-year fixed mortgages increasing slightly to 5.78 percent, up from 5.77 percent the week prior. Mortgage rates for 15-year fixed and 5/1 adjustable mortgages remained steady at 5.42 percent and 5.47 percent, respectively.
Here’s more information on rates from the Zillow Mortgage Rate Monitor.

Also, be sure to visit Mortgages Unzipped, a blog written by mortgage industry experts to help educate consumers during the buying/loan securing process. Mortgage bloggers have written posts and answered questions such as, “What will be the effect from recent announcements in the financial market?” and “What are the differences between FHA and conforming loans?” It’s a great resource for anyone trying to make sense of mortgages — especially in this turbulent climate.