Mortgage rates have crept down to near their low points for the year in recent weeks, leaving potential home buyers and refinancers to ponder those age-old real estate questions: Will rates go any lower, and just how low will they go?

The answer, according to market watcher Keith Gumbinger, is that things won't get any better than this. Rates are about as low as they'll be, he says. So if you are waiting for just the right moment to buy or refinance, now's the time.

"It is our opinion that without more significantly dire economic news or a major slowdown in housing demand, mortgage rates are either at or very close to their bottoms -- within perhaps a quarter-percent, at most," says Gumbinger, vice president of HSH Associates, a Butler, N.J., financial publisher which surveys some 2,000 mortgage lenders nationwide every week. HSH is not a lender and does not make loans.

"We can't stress enough that borrowers should take advantage of the current rate situation and shouldn't wait for significantly lower rates. We should be nearing the end of the summer doldrums in the next few weeks, and the return to more business-oriented focus may disturb the rate pattern, for better or worse."

If you need another reason to act soon, perhaps the latest survey of bank lending practices by the Federal Reserve Board will put you into gear. In what may be a harbinger of things to come for the mortgage market, the study found that many lenders have begun tightening the standards and terms for commercial loans and some consumer loans.

Credit standards for approving residential mortgage loans were largely unchanged over the past three months. But the survey of loan officers from 57 large domestic banks and 20 U.S. branches of foreign-owned institutions found some lenders already have made it more difficult to obtain credit cards and arrange other consumer loans.

In keeping with what Gumbinger calls the resiliency of the mortgage market in the face of less-than-scintillating economic news, senior loan officers also reported that demand for residential mortgages actually increased over the past three months.

Perhaps that's why noted mortgage industry stock analyst Jonathan Gray of Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., has revised his forecast for residential lending volume to $1.74 trillion for this year. If he's right, that would pass the previous record set in 1998.

Gray had been forecasting lending volume to total $1.52 trillion this year, which is well within the consensus forecast of $1.5 trillion to $1.6 trillion.

The Mortgage Bankers Association already has seen an up-tick in recent weeks in the number of loan applications, nearly half of which are now coming from current owners wishing to trade in their older, more expensive loans for newer, cheaper ones.

For more articles by Lew Sichelman, please press here.