Mortgage rates haven’t exactly been affordable lately. The average 30-year mortgage rate has hovered between 6% and 7% for the bulk of the last two years. At one point, it even reached as high as 7.79% — the highest point in decades, according to Freddie Mac. It’s a far cry from the bargain-basement rates we saw in the height of the COVID-19 era, when rates bottomed out at a mere 2.65%, the lowest ever recorded. Those ultra-low rates were likely a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence, borne from the Federal Rese ...