There's no fixed window, and nobody can promise how long any dip lasts, but the size of the move tells you a lot. A small, quickly reversible dip (say a quarter point on a good day) can evaporate within a week. Those are hard to time and rarely worth chasing. A larger structural move behaves differently. As a round illustration, a shift from the low-5s toward the mid-4s tends to take much longer, because rates usually fall gradually rather than in one jump. In a stable environment, a full percentage point of improvement is often a two-to-three-month process, which gives a buyer real time to act. The asymmetry is worth knowing: rates can spike up far faster than they drift down. We've seen a full point of increase happen much quicker than that during sharp volatility. So don't assume you'll have months to react to every move, and don't panic that a meaningful decline will vanish overnight either. The practical play: get fully pre-approved and lock-ready now, so you can move when a rate you're happy with appears, instead of trying to call the exact bottom, which nobody can do. You can watch the market yourself on the Mortgage News Daily rate table, right here on our site.