Buyers who keep sitting on the sidelines waiting for mortgage rates to fall are losing the financial math in most scenarios, according to a new historical analysis from mortgage lender AD Mortgage. The study, titled “Does the Perfect Time to Buy Exist?”, compared buying immediately versus waiting two years across all 50 states and Washington, D.C. from 2000 to 2022, and found that buying now beat waiting in 61% of those scenarios.
The math behind the number
61% of scenarios favored buying immediately over waiting two years, according to the AD Mortgage analysis, which pulled home price data from Zillow, 30-year fixed mortgage rates from the Federal Reserve, and household income figures from the Census Bureau. Researchers assumed a 15% down payment and modeled a hypothetical waiting buyer who banked 10% of their annual household income each year instead of purchasing. Even with that disciplined savings pace built in, the delayed buyer still came out behind in most of the state-year combinations tested.
Geography mattered. Buy-now households in California and Florida came out ahead in 74% of scenarios, the strongest margin in the study, while West Virginia posted the weakest case for buying immediately at 39%, according to the same AD Mortgage findings reported by HousingWire. Timing mattered even more than location. Buying immediately swept nearly every state from 2003 to 2005 and again from 2015 to 2017, landing in the 92% to 100% range those years. From 2007 to 2010, the pattern flipped entirely — waiting won in 100% of scenarios, a stretch that lines up with the run-up to the 2008 housing crash and the price collapse that followed.
The counterintuitive part is what happened when rates actually dropped. Between 2000 and 2002, mortgage rates fell from 8.05% to 6.54%, a bigger cut than most buyers today are hoping for, yet buying immediately still won in only 34% of state scenarios, because home prices and incomes moved against the patient buyer during that stretch. Compare that with 2013 to 2015, when rates slipped modestly from 3.98% to 3.85% and buying immediately won in 84% of scenarios. Falling rates, on their own, told buyers almost nothing about whether patience would pay off.
What it means for a family deciding this fall
“This study shows that trying to predict the market is not a guarantee,” AD Mortgage CEO Max Slyusarchuk said in the report. “Rates matter, but so do home prices, savings and local conditions.” That framing lands differently for a family weighing an offer right now than it would have a year ago. Freddie Mac’s latest survey, released the same week as the AD Mortgage study, put the average 30-year fixed rate at 6.76% — up from 6.71% a week earlier and up from 6.35% a year ago. Rates have not been dropping this year; they have been drifting the wrong direction, which is exactly the scenario the study’s own examples warn about.
None of that means every buyer should rush an offer. A household stretching past its budget, or shopping in a market still correcting hard, is not the audience this data speaks to. But for a family with a stable income, a down payment saved, and a house they can actually afford at today’s payment, the study’s core finding is that waiting for a rate that may not come is its own financial bet — one that has lost more often than it has won over the past two decades. Freddie Mac chief economist Sam Khater put the more practical point plainly in the same release: buyers who do move forward should still shop multiple lenders for quotes, since the rate a household actually gets can vary lender to lender by enough to change the outcome on its own.
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