Rates ease modestly

Mortgage rates have eased, but the phrase needs a ruler. The cleanest national benchmark, Freddie Mac’s weekly survey, put the average 30-year fixed-rate mortgage at 6.46% on April 2, 2026, down from 6.65% a year earlier but up from 6.22% on March 19. The widely shared 6.22% figure comes from daily rate trackers and lender marketplaces, which move faster than the weekly survey and can swing sharply from one day to the next (freddiemac.com) (mortgagenewsdaily.com). That matters because the story here is not that borrowing suddenly became cheap. It is that rates briefly backed off after another run higher, and even that small retreat was enough to change the mood. The reason is simple. Housing lives and dies on monthly payments, and mortgage rates are still stuck in the uncomfortable middle ground where a small move changes affordability but does not fix it. Mortgage News Daily’s daily survey showed the 30-year fixed at 6.55% on March 30, then 6.43% on April 6. That is only 12 basis points, but it arrived during the spring selling season, when buyers are deciding whether to jump in or wait another month (mortgagenewsdaily.com). The market is hypersensitive because Treasury yields remain elevated. In the Federal Reserve’s H.15 release for March 30, the 10-year Treasury yield was 4.35%, far above the levels that would normally support a truly easy mortgage market (federalreserve.gov). That is why the drop feels larger than it is. Buyers are reacting to direction, not just level. Zillow said on April 6 that newly pending listings in March rose 4.6% from a year earlier, the biggest March gain in five years, even as rising mortgage rates started to erode earlier affordability gains (zillow.mediaroom.com). Realtor.com’s March data points the same way: active inventory was up 8.1% year over year, median list prices had fallen annually for a fifth straight month, and financing the median-priced home was at its cheapest March level since 2022, even with rates still high by pre-pandemic standards (realtor.com). More homes on the market and slightly better financing do not create a boom. They create motion. That motion reaches public real estate too, but unevenly. REITs are interest-rate machines. Lower long-term yields help because they reduce financing pressure and make property cash flows look more attractive relative to bonds. Nareit said on April 2 that equity REITs had returned 3.8% year to date through March 31, while the broader U.S. stock market was down about 4% (reit.com). Even so, the sector’s winners are not the companies that merely benefit from a softer tape. They are the ones that locked in cheap debt before rates surged. That is the part investors cannot skip. Nareit has been blunt that listed REITs entered this period with lower leverage, more fixed-rate debt, and a greater reliance on unsecured borrowing than they had before the financial crisis (reit.com). Company filings show what that looks like in practice. NNN REIT said in February that its weighted average debt maturity was 10.8 years and its weighted average interest rate was 4.2% at the end of 2025, with $1.2 billion of available liquidity (nnnreit.com). When mortgage rates flicker lower, that kind of balance sheet turns a market sigh of relief into something a company can actually use.