On July 29 the Federal Reserve did something that should have ended a bet a lot of Greater Boston buyers have been making all year. It held interest rates flat. That part was expected. What was not: three of the Fed’s regional presidents voted to raise rates, and not a single official argued to cut them. The new chair, Kevin Warsh, walked out of the room sounding hawkish.
For most of 2026 I have had the same conversation on repeat. A buyer, pre-approved and ready, tells me they are going to wait for the 30-year to drift back into the 5s before they pull the trigger. I get it. Nobody wants to lock 6.8% if 5.8% is around the corner. The problem is that 5.8% is not around the corner, and while everyone has been staring at the rate, the price of the house has been the number quietly doing the damage.
That is the whole thing I want to lay out here. In this market you watch the rate, but you pay the price. In Greater Boston those two numbers have spent the last two years moving in opposite directions, and the July meeting made the gap worse, not better.
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What the Fed actually did on July 29
Start with the facts, because they got garbled in a lot of the coverage.
Kevin Warsh was sworn in as the 17th chair of the Federal Reserve on May 22, 2026, taking over from Jerome Powell. He got there by the narrowest margin in the modern history of the job, a 54 to 45 Senate vote. He arrived with a reputation to protect and a hawkish record to back it.
The July 28 to 29 meeting was his first real test. The Fed held the federal funds rate in a target range of 3.5% to 3.75% and left policy unchanged. On its own a hold is a non-event. The story is in the dissents. Three regional presidents, Cleveland’s Beth Hammack, Minneapolis’s Neel Kashkari, and Dallas’s Lorie Logan, voted to raise the rate by a quarter point. That is the first time since September 2016 that three policymakers broke from the majority all pointing the same way, and the way was up.
Read that again if you have been waiting for cuts. The live disagreement inside the Fed right now is between holding and hiking. Cutting is not in the conversation. Warsh spent his first meeting keeping rates flat over the objection of colleagues who wanted them higher. Whatever the Fed does next, the odds of it handing you a cheaper mortgage this year got longer.
6.78%, and nobody serious is forecasting a 5-handle
The mortgage market heard the same thing you just did. As of August 11 the average 30-year fixed sat at 6.78%. Freddie Mac’s weekly survey, the industry benchmark, came in at 6.69%, its fifth straight weekly increase and the highest reading in more than a year. Call it the high 6s either way.
Here is the part that should settle the waiting game. Look at what the people whose actual job is forecasting rates expect. Fannie Mae’s housing team sees the 30-year holding near 6.4% through the rest of 2026 and into 2027. The Mortgage Bankers Association has it around 6.5% straight through 2027. Those are the published outlooks, and neither one has a 5 in front of it.
So when a buyer tells me they are waiting for the 5s, I ask where they are getting that number, because the forecasters are not. A rate in the 5s would take a real economic shock, the kind that usually shows up with job losses and a recession attached. That is not a market you want to be house-hunting in anyway. Waiting for a 5-handle is betting on bad news and hoping the bad news only touches the parts you like.
In Boston, cheaper money has never meant cheaper homes
Underneath the waiting is an assumption: that lower rates will make homes more affordable. In much of the country there is an argument for that. In Greater Boston the record says the opposite.
Go back to the fall of 2024. Rates dipped to almost 6%, the lowest in two years. If cheap money produced cheap homes, that was the moment. Instead the market froze. Owners sitting on 3% and 4% mortgages had no reason to sell into a higher-rate market, so listings stayed scarce, and the Globe’s own headline that year was that lower rates were no help to a frozen market. Prices did not fall. They regrouped and climbed. By this spring the Greater Boston single-family median crossed back over $1 million, hitting $1,032,500 in April, after first breaking that line in the summer of 2025.
That is the pattern here, and it has held for years. When rates dip in a supply-starved metro, one of two things happens. Either sellers stay locked in and there is still nothing to buy, or the buyers who were waiting all show up at once and bid against each other. Neither one makes a house cheaper. The only thing that reliably falls when rates fall is your leverage as a buyer, because everyone you were competing with comes off the sidelines the same week you do.
Supply is the reason. Greater Boston is sitting at about 1.8 months of inventory. A balanced market runs four to six months. At under two months this is a market where the house, not the buyer, sets the terms, and a rate cut does not change that math. It just adds bidders.
The real cost of waiting, and it is not the rate
Let me put actual numbers on it, because this is where the waiting bet gets expensive in a way people do not feel until they add it up.
Take a buyer who eyed a median-ish Greater Boston single-family in the fall 2024 rate dip and decided to hold out for better. Back then, call it a $900,000 house at 6.1%. Today that same tier of house is closer to $1,000,000 and the rate is about 6.8%. On 20% down the monthly principal and interest went from roughly $4,363 to about $5,215. That is $852 more a month, more than $10,000 a year, for waiting.
Now the part that matters most. Of that $852, only about $331 is the higher rate. The other $521 is the higher price. Those are not the same kind of problem. The rate you can refinance away if the chance ever comes. The extra $100,000 of price you cannot. It sits on your loan balance, in the down payment you already handed over, and in the property tax assessment for as long as you own the place. You watched the rate. You paid the price.
Where the priced-out buyers are actually going
None of this means buyers vanished. June single-family sales across Greater Boston were up 9.2% over a year earlier. The active buyers are not sitting home waiting on Warsh. They are adjusting.
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The clearest adjustment is the move out of single-families and into condos. When the entry point for a house runs past $1 million, the condo becomes the front door, and you can watch the demand stack up in the $500,000 to $800,000 band across the inner suburbs. In Quincy, condos have been trading around $529,000 this year, selling at better than 99% of list in about a month, while single-families sit up near $756,000. In Somerville the condo median ran about $796,000 in June against a single-family median closer to $1,245,000. Same story in both towns. The condo is what is actually attainable, so that is where the competition is going.
If you are getting priced out of the house you pictured, that is not a dead end, it is a redirect. I would rather have you in a well-located Somerville or Quincy condo you can actually win than a single-family bidding war you keep losing. Our guide to condo living in Massachusetts walks through what that trade really looks like, and if you are buying your first home in Massachusetts the condo path is usually where the math works first.
Stop timing the Fed. Lock a strategy with a lender.
So if waiting on Washington is the losing move, what is the winning one? Stop trying to time the rate and start engineering the payment. There are three tools that do exactly that, and in this market sellers are often willing to help pay for them.
A temporary buydown, usually a 2-1 buydown, drops your rate two points in year one and one point in year two before settling at the note rate. It is almost always funded by the seller or builder, and the money sits in an escrow account. The catch worth knowing: the lender still qualifies you at the full note rate, so it is payment relief, not a qualifying trick.
Permanent points buy the rate down for the life of the loan. Roughly one point, one percent of the loan amount, buys about a quarter point off the rate. If you are going to hold the house more than a few years, a permanent buydown usually beats the temporary one, and you can split a seller credit between both.
An adjustable-rate mortgage is the third lever. A 5/1 ARM has been running well under the 30-year fixed this year, and buyers noticed. ARM applications jumped to their highest share since 2022, close to one in ten loans. If you do not plan to sit in the house for three decades, paying for 30 years of rate certainty you will never use is just overpaying.
The common thread is that all three are things a good lender can price for you in an afternoon, and a motivated seller often funds. Concessions in the resale market have been running in the two to three percent range, and that is real money aimed straight at your rate. Run your own numbers first with our buyer closing cost calculator, then have a lender price the buydown and the ARM side by side. That is a strategy. Waiting is not.
For sellers, higher rates can be an advantage
Sellers hear “rates hit a one-year high” and assume it is bad news for them. In a supply-starved town it can be the opposite.
Higher rates do not remove urgency from the market. They remove tourists. The buyer who was only ever going to move if the Fed handed them a 5-handle was never going to write you a strong offer anyway. What is left when rates climb is the serious, pre-approved buyer who needs a home on a real timeline, and in Greater Boston that buyer still walks into a market with about 1.8 months of supply and almost nothing to choose from. Fewer casual shoppers, the same scarce inventory, more motivated competition for the good listings. That is leverage, and it is moving toward the well-priced seller, not away.
The catch is “well-priced.” This is not a forgiving market for a swing-for-the-fences number. The June data showed the median easing off the spring peak even as sales rose, which is what happens when sellers price to last year’s headline instead of this month’s reality. Price it right and a low-supply town still rewards you. Price it on ego and it sits while the market moves past it. If you want to know where your own home actually stands, our home value tool and our guide to selling your home in Massachusetts are the place to start.
What I am telling clients right now
Two things, depending on which side of the table you are on.
If you are buying: stop waiting on the Fed. The people paid to forecast rates do not see the 5s coming, the July meeting made cuts less likely rather than more, and every month you wait in this metro has cost more in price than it saved in rate. Get fully pre-approved. Have a lender price a 2-1 buydown, a permanent point, and an ARM so you know your real payment options. Then buy the right house when you find it, and refinance the rate later if the chance ever comes. You can always fix a rate. You cannot un-overpay.
If you are selling: you probably have more leverage than the headlines suggest, as long as you price to the market in front of you. The rate-timers are out of your buyer pool, but the serious buyers are still here and still have almost nothing to look at.
None of this is a reason to panic in either direction. It is a reason to stop waiting on Washington and make a decision about your own situation, your own price point, your own town. If you want to walk through what that looks like, reach out. That is the conversation I am having every day right now.
Buying, selling, or just trying to figure out whether waiting makes any sense for you, I am happy to talk it through. No pressure, just a straight read on your numbers. You can reach out here.
Sources
- CNBC: Kevin Warsh wins Senate confirmation as Fed chair, 54 to 45
- CNBC: Divided Fed holds interest rates steady, three officials dissent (July 2026)
- Federal Reserve: July 28 to 29, 2026 FOMC materials
- Bankrate: 30-year mortgage rates
- Freddie Mac: Primary Mortgage Market Survey
- Scotsman Guide: MBA and Fannie Mae 2026 to 2027 rate forecasts
- Boston Globe: Greater Boston single-family median crosses $1 million again
- Boston Globe: Lower mortgage rates are no help for Greater Boston’s frozen market
- Boston Globe: Mortgage rates near 6% in fall 2024
- Boston Agent Magazine: MAR June 2026 sales data
- Centre Realty Group: Boston housing mid-year 2026 report (months of supply)
- Redfin: Quincy, MA housing market
- Redfin: Somerville, MA housing market
- Yahoo Finance: Temporary vs permanent rate buydowns explained
- AmeriSave: ARM vs fixed-rate mortgage in 2026
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