The New York Times, May 9, 2024, A Little-Known Way Home Buyers Can Beat High Mortgage Rates
Home prices were already high when Ellen Harper, a software architect living in Atlanta, started searching for a house in 2021. But she couldn’t have anticipated the quick surge in interest rates the next year, and, even with a large down payment, the new math made her uneasy.
This year, however, she stumbled upon what felt like a portal to the not-so-distant past: listings of thousands of homes that come with a low-rate mortgage, which can be transferred from the existing homeowner to a new home buyer, known as an assumable mortgage.