Ed Neuhaus 
If you bought a home in 2023 or 2024, there’s a decent chance someone told you to “marry the house, date the rate.” Maybe it was your agent. Maybe it was a lender. Maybe it was a well-meaning friend who heard it on TikTok. The pitch was simple: buy now, refinance later when rates come back down.
It sounded reasonable at the time. Rates had just jumped from 3% to 7% in barely a year and a half. Everybody assumed they’d come back down. The question was when, not if.
Well, it’s 2026 now. And the 30-year fixed rate is sitting at about 6.1%. The Mortgage Bankers Association is forecasting rates will hold in the low to mid 6% range through 2026, 2027, and 2028. Fannie Mae thinks we might dip below 6% by late 2026. Maybe.
That refinance everybody was counting on? For most people, it’s not coming. At least not the way they were promised.
What “Date the Rate” Actually Meant in Practice
Lets be clear about what happened. When rates spiked in 2022 and 2023, the real estate industry had a problem. Buyers who were pre-approved at 3.5% were suddenly looking at 7%. Monthly payments jumped by 40% or more on the same house. Deals were falling apart.
So agents and lenders needed a way to keep buyers in the market. And “marry the house, date the rate” became the answer. It was catchy. It was optimistic. And it gave buyers permission to stretch their budget because hey, this is temporary. You’ll refinance in a year or two.
Some buyers took it further and went with adjustable-rate mortgages to get an even lower initial payment. The logic was the same: rates will drop before your ARM resets, and you’ll refinance into a fixed rate. A survey from Point found that 70% of ARM borrowers from the last decade now regret that decision. About 1.7 million homeowners bought with ARMs since 2019, and hundreds of thousands of those loans are resetting right now into significantly higher payments.
I’m not bringing this up to dunk on anyone. I’m bringing it up because there’s a lesson here that matters for anyone buying a home today or in the next few years.
The Part Nobody Wanted to Hear
I never told a client to date the rate. Not once. And it wasn’t because I had some crystal ball that told me rates would stay elevated. It’s because I’ve been selling homes in Austin for 16 years, and there’s a pattern that most people in this industry either don’t know or don’t want to talk about.
Mortgage rates don’t come down because things are going well. They come down because something is going wrong.
Think about the last two times we saw truly low rates. In 2020 and 2021, the 30-year fixed dropped to a record low of 2.65%. Why? A global pandemic shut down the economy and the Federal Reserve pumped trillions of dollars into the system to keep it from collapsing. Before that, rates dropped into the low 4s and eventually the 3s in the years following 2008. Why? The worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Millions of foreclosures. Unemployment through the roof.
Those weren’t normal market conditions. Those were emergencies. And here’s the cruel irony that nobody talks about: the conditions that create low rates also create conditions where buying a house is incredibly risky. When rates dropped in 2008, lending standards tightened so much that most people couldn’t qualify for a mortgage even at those lower rates. When rates dropped in 2020, nobody knew if they’d have a job next month.
Low rates aren’t a gift. They’re a symptom. And by the time you get them, the economy around you is usually in a place where taking on a 30-year debt obligation is the last thing you should be doing.
The Math That Should Have Killed This Advice
Even setting aside the macro picture, the refinance math never worked as cleanly as people were told.
A refinance isn’t free. You’re looking at 2% to 5% of your loan amount in closing costs. On a $400,000 mortgage, that’s $8,000 to $20,000. A recent analysis found that refinancing won’t pay off for most borrowers unless rates drop by at least 0.75 percentage points. And drops of a quarter to half a percent often fail to deliver short-term savings at all, with the typical borrower still underwater on closing costs after three years.
So even if rates drop from 7% to 6%, which is roughly what’s happened, many of those 2023 buyers are barely breaking even on a refinance after closing costs. That’s not what “date the rate” promised. It promised meaningful relief. A lower payment. Breathing room. For most people, the math just isn’t there.
What I Tell Buyers Instead
Look, I’m not saying people shouldn’t have bought homes in 2023 or 2024. Real estate is a long game, and if you bought a home you can afford at the rate you locked in, you’re going to be fine over a 10 or 15 year horizon. The Austin housing market forecast still points to gradual appreciation and recovery. Time in the market beats timing the market. That’s the tortoise philosophy and I believe it completely.
But there’s a difference between “you’ll be fine long-term” and “don’t worry about the rate because you’ll just refinance later.” The first one is honest. The second one is a gamble dressed up as a strategy.
What I tell my buyers is simple. Buy a home you can afford at today’s rate. Not the rate you hope to refinance into. Not the rate your lender says might be available next year. Today’s rate. If the payment works for your budget right now, with no refinance needed, then it’s a good deal. If you need a future rate drop to make the numbers work, you’re not buying a home. You’re making a bet.
And right now, with prices at three-year lows and sellers willing to negotiate on everything from closing costs to repairs, the actual deal you can get today is arguably better than what buyers got in 2023 even though rates were similar. The market has corrected. Inventory is up. You have leverage. That’s real value you can underwrite today, not a hypothetical refinance down the road.
The Bigger Lesson
The real problem with “marry the house, date the rate” wasn’t that it was wrong in every case. Some people who bought at 7% in 2023 have already refinanced into the low 6s and saved a few hundred bucks a month. Good for them. But the advice was given as a blanket statement to every buyer regardless of their financial situation, and it encouraged people to stretch further than they should have on the assumption that relief was coming.
A 2025 survey found that nearly two-thirds of Gen Z and millennial buyers said refinancing to a lower rate is important to their financial health. That’s a lot of people whose household budgets depend on something they can’t control.
I think what happened is understandable. Agents were trying to help. Lenders were trying to help. Nobody wanted to be the person who said “maybe you should wait” or “maybe you need to look at a lower price point.” That’s not a fun conversation. But it’s an honest one. And honest is what I’m trying to be here.
The lesson going forward is pretty straightforward. Don’t build your housing budget around a rate that doesn’t exist yet. Don’t assume the Fed is going to bail you out with lower rates, because the only thing that triggers that kind of intervention is the kind of economic crisis you don’t want to be buying into. And if an agent tells you not to worry about the rate because you can always refinance, ask them what happens if you can’t.
Where We Go From Here
If you’re shopping for a home in Austin right now, you’re actually in a pretty good spot. Not because rates are low. They’re not. But because the combination of price corrections, elevated inventory, and motivated sellers gives you negotiating power that didn’t exist two or three years ago.
In Bee Cave and Lakeway, I’m seeing sellers offer concessions on closing costs, rate buydowns, and repairs that would have been laughed at in 2021. In Dripping Springs and Westlake, well-priced homes are still moving but buyers have real leverage to negotiate terms.
That’s the conversation worth having. Not “don’t worry about the rate” but “lets find you a deal that works at today’s rate, with today’s prices, using the leverage you have right now.” If rates drop later? Great. That’s a bonus. But your purchase should make sense on day one.
If you want to talk through what the numbers look like for your specific situation, reach out. I’ve been doing this long enough to know that the best deals happen when you buy with your eyes open, not when you buy hoping something changes.
Ed Neuhaus is the broker of Neuhaus Realty Group, specializing in Austin’s Hill Country corridor including Bee Cave, Lakeway, Westlake, and Dripping Springs.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does “marry the house, date the rate” mean?
It means buy the home you want now even if rates are high, with the plan to refinance to a lower rate later. The phrase became popular in 2022-2024 as mortgage rates jumped from 3% to 7%, and agents used it to encourage buyers to keep purchasing despite higher payments.
Is “date the rate” bad advice in 2026?
For most buyers who followed this advice in 2023-2024, the promised refinance hasn’t materialized the way they hoped. Rates are around 6.1% in early 2026, and forecasts show them staying in the 6% range through at least 2028. Refinancing from 7% to 6% barely breaks even after closing costs for most borrowers.
Why haven’t mortgage rates come back down to 3%?
Rates below 4% were a historic anomaly driven by unprecedented Federal Reserve intervention during the COVID-19 pandemic and, to a lesser extent, the 2008 financial crisis. Before 2009, the 30-year fixed rate had never been below 5% in recorded history. Rates in the 6% range are much closer to the long-term historical norm.
Should I still buy a home if I can’t refinance later?
Yes, as long as you can comfortably afford the payment at today’s rate. The key is to budget based on your actual rate, not a hypothetical future rate. With Austin home prices at three-year lows and sellers offering significant concessions, the overall deal today can be excellent even at 6% rates.
