Mortgage payments are falling in some major metros

• Monthly mortgage payments fell in 12 of 50 of the most populous metros in March, a sign of declining or flat home prices.
• The mortgage declines are mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area, Florida and Texas.
• Still, monthly housing costs have reached an all-time high, keeping many homebuyers on the sidelines.

A recent drop in monthly mortgage payments in some big housing markets is good news for homebuyers looking for deals.

Monthly mortgage payments fell in March from a year prior in 12 of the 50 most populous metropolitan areas, including Jacksonville, Fla., San Francisco, Calif. and Austin, Texas, according to an analysis by real-estate brokerage Redfin.

Lower mortgage payments are a sign that home prices have fallen or stayed flat.

The biggest drop in mortgage payments was in Jacksonville, Fla, with a 4.2% decline, followed by San Francisco, Calif. (-3.5%), Oakland, Calif. (-2%), West Palm Beach, Fla. (-1.6%) and Austin, Texas (-1.1%) in the rest of the top five.

In areas where mortgage payments are declining, house hunters should be pushing for deals, said Ali Mafi, a Redfin Premier agent in San Francisco, in a statement.

“I recently had a client who was looking at a single-family home that had been sitting on the market. I told him, ‘you’re in the driver’s seat; now is your chance to get a deal on a house in a neighborhood where you’d normally never get a deal,’” Mafi said.

“Buyers are having luck negotiating because many of the people who need to sell now — those who are relocating, for example — are anxious and eager to sell quickly, before the economy potentially gets even more uncertain,” he added.

Below is a searchable table of the 50 most populous metros where mortgage payments are going up or down.

A small silver lining

But the drop in mortgage payments in some areas may only be a small silver lining since costs are still too high for many would-be homebuyers.

The median monthly housing payment reached an all-time high of $2,870 as of April, largely because home prices continue to rise and mortgage rates remain high, Redfin said.

The conditions are stopping many house hunters from buying a home: Redfin said mortgage-purchase applications are down 6% in April from March and pending home sales declined 2.8% year-over-year in April.

“A lot of people who would normally be making moves right now are standing still,” said Bliss Ong, a Redfin Premier agent in Seattle, in a statement.

She said that prospective homebuyers are waiting for the economic uncertainty, including a high risk of a recession, to pass.

“The people who are buying are picky; for instance, buyers aren’t making offers if a home is on a busy street, or if it has one bathroom instead of two bathrooms," Ong said. "When the market was hotter, those homes would fly off the shelves despite not checking every single box.”