Feeling stuck trying to sell your home right now? You’re not alone. With today’s mortgage rates higher than what many of us have locked in, moving can seem like a tough call. But what if you could make those higher rates work for you? Spoiler alert: you can, and the secret might be hiding in your current home’s equity.

What Is Equity?

Think of equity as a simple math problem. Freddie Mac puts it like this:

“. . . your home’s equity is the difference between how much your home is worth and how much you owe on your mortgage.”

As you pay down your mortgage and as your home’s value increases, your equity grows. Thanks to the rapid rise in home prices recently, you might have more equity than you think.

The Equity Picture

According to the latest from the Census and ATTOM, over two-thirds of homeowners have either fully paid off their mortgage (green in the chart) or have at least 50% equity (blue in the chart).

That’s a significant amount of equity for most homeowners.

How Your Equity Can Help You Move

Selling your house could mean using your equity to help ease the stress of today’s mortgage rates. As Danielle Hale, Chief Economist for Realtor.com, puts it:

“A consideration today’s homeowners should review is what their home equity picture looks like. With the typical home listing price up 40% from just five years ago, many home sellers are sitting on a healthy equity cushion. This means they are likely to walk away from a home sale with proceeds that they can use to offset the amount of borrowing needed for their next home purchase.”

Here are a few ways you can leverage your equity when buying your next home:

• Go All-Cash: If you’ve built up enough equity, you might be able to buy your next home outright without a mortgage.
• Make a Bigger Down Payment: Use your equity for a larger down payment on your new home, reducing the amount you need to borrow and softening the blow of today’s rates.

The First Step: Find Out Your Equity

Ready to see how much equity you’ve got? You’ll need:

• Your current mortgage balance (check your latest mortgage statement).
• The current value of your home.

For the home’s value, you could pay for an appraisal, but a local real estate agent can give you a professional equity assessment report (PEAR) for free.

Connect with a trusted agent, crunch the numbers, and you might find that moving is more doable than you thought, thanks to your equity.

Bottom Line

Curious about your home’s equity and how it could make your next move possible? Let’s chat and figure it out together.