By Marie Brown

SACRAMENTO (OBSNews.com) – Mortgage rates on a 30 year fixed rate mortgage in the United States again reached a record average low of 4.32% this week, the lowest since surveys began in 1971, according to mortgage giant Freddie Mac. The low rates are one of the few rays of hope for a battered housing market that recently saw record low numbers of pending home sales following the end of the federal tax credits for homebuyers that cause a lot of buyers to purchase real estate in Sacramento and elsewhere.

The 15 year fixed rate mortgage also saw a record low this week of 3.83%, and the 5-year Treasury-indexed hybrid adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM) averaged 3.54 percent, yet another record.

But, these low rates don’t mean that buyers will be jumping back into the market with both feet because the job market is still experiencing massive difficulties and jobs are not being created quickly enough to help drive down persistently high unemployment rates. The national unemployment rate is still stuck at 9.6%, while the rate of unemployed workers in Sacramento is a miserable 12.7%.

“We’re definitely seeing fewer buyers looking for homes with the expiration of the federal tax credit, but home prices have seemed to stabilize in recent months, and everyone’s hoping that 2011 sees an improved job market which should help our local Sacramento real estate market,” commented real estate broker Patrick McGilvray, president of TheHomeBuyingCenter.com, a Sacramento real estate brokerage. McGilvray added that the low mortgage rates in Sacramento are helping qualified buyers get into a new home.

Home Buyers May Have an Edge over Sellers

On Wednesday, the chief economist for the National Association of Realtors, Lawrence Yun, said that the recovery in the housing market could take as long as a decade. “Home sales will remain soft in the months ahead, but improved affordability conditions should help with a recovery,” he said. “But the recovery looks to be a long process. Home buyers over the past year got a great deal, and buyers for the balance of this year have an edge over sellers. For those who bought at or near the peak several years ago, particularly in markets experiencing big bubbles, it may take over a decade to fully recover lost equity.”

On the national housing front the real estate market seems to have stopped its free-fall. According to Amy Crews Cutts, the deputy chief economist for Freddie Mac, "House prices, however, appear to be firming. Home prices rose 2.3 percent between the first and second quarter of this year, reaching the highest level since the fourth quarter of 2008, according to the S&P/Case Shiller® National Home Price Index . In addition, 15 metropolitan areas in the 20-City Composite Index experienced annual house price growth in June, compared to 13 in May and 11 in April."

One thing that almost all market watchers agree on is that we’ve still got a long way to go to get the national and local economies fully functioning again with a sober and predictable real estate market.