As home construction

continues to be strong on this side of Atlanta, a couple of facts should

be fairly obvious:

Tens of thousands

of people are arriving, and expected to continue arriving in the next

few years, to occupy these homes.

Those people

will need access to hundreds of millions of dollars to purchase their

homes.

And while many

people are fretting over a first-time home purchase or whether to move

up to a bigger house, there are those who are content to simply stay where

they are but looking to make their situation a bit more attractively financially.

Mortgage experts

in Fayette County deal with all of these questions, and more, every day.

As famiies make preparations for what is possibly the biggest investment

of their lives, these professionals sort through the jungle of numbers

to help clients find the most housing bang for the buck.

Interest rates

are fairly low, and have been for several years. That in itself would

seem to make buying a house extremely attractive. But there's a lot more

to it than that.

Unemployment

rates, the economy in general all sorts of factors are considered when

mortgage rates are established, according to Martha Fulmer of Mortgage

Matters in Fayetteville.

A common mistake

made by many customers, she said, is assuming that whenever the Federal

Reserve lowers its rate, everything else drops as well. That's not always

the case, and mortgage rates can occasionally go up a bit, she added.

Jackie Pratt

of Synovus Mortgage in Peachtree City agrees that many folks make that

error. "As soon as anyone see that [Fed reduction] on TV, they think

we've lowered our rates. That's a big misconception."

Pratt said

that one reason for a recent decrease in mortgage rates is a soft labor

market and slightly higher unemployment figures.

Both Fulmer

and Pratt said that they have seen a large increase in refinancing business

recently because of rates going down over several years' time. But there

is no single refinancing method that works for everyone.

If the current

rate is 1 1/2 to 2 percent lower that your rate, and if yours is fixed,

then refinancing is worth at least looking at, Pratt said.

But going through

the refinancing process is not free, and customers should remember to

include those costs when figuring out how much money will eventually be

saved. Otherwise, you're just eating up equity.

"If you

can pay yourself back in two years, that's good," said Fulmer. "But

if you're spending $4,000 in fees to save $100 a month, it's going to

take 40 months to see any savings. That's too long."

Both mortgage

professionals are seeing a lot of customers shorten the length of their

loans. Many are switching from 30-year mortgages to 15 years without an

increase in monthly payments, Pratt said.

Others are

going up slightly in house size without their payments going up. "The

same payments can be made today on a $230,000 house as on a $200,000 house

a year ago," according to Fulmer.

Lower rates

are also making it attractive for people to get out adjustable rate mortgages

and balloon notes, Fulmer added, allowing people to recover from possible

financial problems of past years.

"A lot

of people are combining first and second mortgages and home equity loans

into one mortgage," she said.

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