Most of the homeowners I sit down with lately are people who have reasons to move: their house is bigger than they need because the kids moved out, they want to be closer to family, or they’ve been eyeing a Lakes Region property for years, and the timing finally feels right. What’s holding them back, you ask? Well, their mortgage rate is the number one thing I hear.
This is one of the most common situations I’m working through with clients right now, and I want to share how I think about it because I find that once we look at the whole picture, the decision may feel very different from how it did when they were concentrating only on the rate. 
A lot of Southern Maine homeowners locked in rates between 2020 and 2022, many of them in the low 3s. Currently, rates are sitting around six to six and a half percent. The gap is real! But a mortgage rate doesn’t exist in isolation, and the number that tends to change the conversion is the one on the other side of the equation: equity.
Values in Southern Maine have climbed sharply over the past five years. The median sale price in Cumberland County is now around $590,000, and in Windham specifically, homes have appreciated roughly 9 percent in just the last year. If you bought a home in this area in 2017 or 2018 for $280,000, it may be worth $420,000 or more today. That difference, minus what you still owe, is yours. It doesn’t go away when you move and can become your down payment.
And that really matters more than you realize when you’re running rate comparisons in your head. A larger down payment reduces the loan amount you carry at the higher rate. The monthly payment gap that feels so daunting on paper becomes smaller when you factor in real equity numbers rather than hypothetical ones. I have sat with clients who came in convinced the math would not work until we ran the actual numbers together.
What I find is that people who have been sitting on the question of what to do, usually have not had an opportunity to look at all the pieces together at the same time. The rate, the equity, the current market, etc., and when we look at all those things together, the path forward becomes much clearer. Sometimes the answer is to wait, other times we find the math is better than expected!
Ready to make the move? Contact Landing Real Estate today and let us guide you home!