A Little-Known Way Home Buyers Can Beat High Mortgage Rates

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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 following year and, even with a large down payment, the new math made her uneasy. Earlier 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. Ms. Harper, who is in her 50s, managed to snag one of these homes, closing two weeks ago on a four-bedroom brick colonial, in Fairburn, Ga., with a $1,400 monthly payment. It’s an amount she’ll be able to comfortably afford into retirement thanks, in large part, to a 2.49 percent mortgage rate. That’s less than half the current rate of 7.09 percent on 30-year-fixed loans, the most popular type of mortgage. “I didn’t want to get a bad mortgage and be in a ball and chain situation where all I would be able to do is pay the mortgage,” Ms. Harper said. She found her home through Roam, a start-up that went live in September that lists homes with assumable low-rate loans, and assists buyers through the process. “There were other homes — they were nice and everything,” she added, “but I went for the lowest rate I could find.”