After declining for three consecutive weeks, mortgage rates are in a holding pattern. The average rate for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage is lower than it was a year ago.

“Mortgage rates remained mostly unchanged this week, while mortgage applications rose 5.3 percent from the previous week,” says Sam Khater, Freddie Mac’s chief economist. “The general decline in rates we have seen recently, combined with rebounding pending home sales, hint at a strong spring home buying season.”

Freddie Mac reports the following national average mortgage rates for the week ending Feb. 28:

• 30-year fixed-rate mortgages: averaged 4.35 percent, with an average 0.5 point, unchanged from last week. Last year at this time, 30-year rates averaged 4.43 percent.
• 15-year fixed-rate mortgages: averaged 3.77 percent, with an average 0.5 point, dropping slightly from last week’s 3.78 percent average. A year ago, 15-year rates averaged 3.90 percent.
• 5-year hybrid adjustable-rate mortgages: averaged 3.84 percent, with an average 0.3 point, unchanged from last week. A year ago, 5-year ARMs averaged 3.62 percent.

First-time buyers are finding the housing market challenging to break into. On average, they have to put in 3.8 offers before their offer is accepted, which is higher than the 2.5 offers that repeat buyers typically make, according to a new survey of about 2,000 U.S. adults from NerdWallet, a personal finance website.

Further, 56 percent of first-time buyers say they offered more than the asking price before they were successful in their home purchase. For comparison, 35 percent of repeat buyers say they offered more than the asking price.

“It shows that things are tough out there for first-time home buyers,” says Holden Lewis, home expert at NerdWallet. “There’s just more competition for those homes. There’s not a whole lot of them out there in a lot of markets, and there’s a lot of buyers who are competing for those homes.”

As the newbies in the market too, first-time buyers may be prone to some mistakes, such as low balling initial offers or failing to shop around for their mortgage, Lewis says.

Here are three common mistakes first-time buyers often make:

Failing to shop around for a mortgage: NerdWallet’s research found that 50 percent of all buyers applied to just one lender for their mortgage. But that could be leaving money on the table. Shopping around can save you, on average, $430 in interest in the first year for those with a fixed-rate $260,000 mortgage, NerdWallet’s study finds. “That savings would accumulate and compound for every year that they had the loan,” Lewis told CNBC.

Believing the 20 percent down payment myth: Lewis says another common rookie mistake is believing you have to put down more of a down payment than you really do. Seventy-one percent of current homeowners say they made down payments of 20 percent or less, according to U.S. Census Bureau data (of those, 23 percent of buyers put down between 11 to 20 percent; 16 percent put down 6 to 10 percent; and 32 percent put down 5 percent or less). In markets where home prices are rising at a faster clip, buyers may find it time to buy now rather than wait until they ‘ve saved a 20 percent down payment, Lewis says. But Lewis adds that in some markets, however, home values may be increasing more than what a buyer would pay for mortgage insurance. Lenders usually require mortgage insurance when borrowers don’t put at least 20 percent down.

Showing unwillingness to compromise: First-time buyers may also be going in with too-high expectations. Housing inventories in the lower price ranges, which typically first-time buyers are looking at, are low and that means limited choices. Twenty-six percent of all recent buyers surveyed say they purchased a home knowing it would need improvement or work. Twenty-one percent also said they had to compromise on their list of must-haves. Real estate experts urge first-time buyers to identify their top priorities, such as commute times, schools, and square footage. “It really helps to know going into that it that you’re just simply not going to get everything you want,” Lewis told CNBC.

Parents are increasingly helping their adult children buy their first home. In fact, a new study suggests that if families were considered a financial institution, the “Bank of Mom and Dad” would be the seventh largest mortgage lender in the country.

Parents and grandparents supported the nationwide purchase of $317 billion worth of property—1.2 million homes—last year, according to a newly released study from the Legal & General Group, a multinational financial services institution.

One in five of buyers received gifts or interest-free loans from family members, the study shows. The average amount buyers received from them was $39,000. The Pacific region saw the greatest share of young adults receiving financial help in buying; the Rocky Mountain region saw the lowest.

More than half—51 percent—of prospective home buyers under the age of 35 say they expect to have help from their family or friends when buying a home. And young adults who already have purchased a home say that without the gift from the “Bank of Mom and Dad,” they would have had to delay their home purchase for at least three years.

“For many, perhaps most,young adults, buying a house without help is an increasingly unattainable goal,” says Nigel Wilson, chief executive at Legal & General Group. But Wilson calls it a worrisome trend that so many young adults are relying on help from family and friends to buy a home.

For example, family and friends who provide financial assistance may be putting their own finances in jeopardy to do so. For example, they reported taking out a loan (15 percent), raiding their 401(k) savings (8 percent), downsizing their own home (6 percent), or coming out of retirement (3 percent), the study showed. The study authors warn that too many of the younger generation may be dependent on their parents and grandparents to buy a home, even if it comes at a financial strain to the gift giver.

The Bank of Mom and Dad “reflects, first and foremost, a housing market where significant problems remain in matching the supply and demand of different types of housing, most notably starter homes and affordable housing of all kinds,” Wilson says. “As the population changes and the millennial generation strives to join the home owning democracy, new thinking is due on meeting the needs and aspirations of Americans.”

Countries around the world are cracking down on money laundering schemes in the luxury real estate sphere. “Real estate has always been a favorite asset for criminals, through which they would launder their money,” Brigitte Unger, a professor at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands and an expert in global money laundering issues, told Mansion Global.

Real estate money laundering schemes are estimated to reach $1.6 trillion a year worldwide, according to a report from Accuity, a global risk and compliance company. “It was becoming increasingly apparent in countries such as Australia, America, and the United Kingdom that a number of assets being purchased could possibly be linked to political or criminal activities where money laundering was about to occur,” Patrick Hinchin, vice president of commercial strategy at Accuity, told Mansion Global.

Real estate purchases tied to organized crime and market abuse are being blamed for skyrocketing home prices in some areas. For example, criminals will purchase real estate in a city where the housing market holds high values and then hide behind a shell company or a trusted business associate. They’ll then either rent the property or remodel it using criminal funds and later sell it for a profit, Unger says.

To help combat scams in the U.S., FinCEN, an investigative arm of the U.S. Treasury Department, has lowered the threshold for real estate transaction sizes involving shell companies that require title companies to identify the parties behind the shell companies. The threshold is now cash purchases above $300,000 or transactions involving cryptocurrency. The orders apply to all title companies in Boston, Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth, Honolulu, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Antonio, San Diego, San Francisco, and Seattle.

FinCEN says that since the requirement was enacted in January 2016 to make LLC owners who purchase luxury real estate identify themselves, it has seen cash purchases plunge by 70 percent. However, other security experts say those who still want to use real estate to launder money are seeking markets outside of those 12 to continue to hide behind shell companies.

Other countries are stepping up their efforts. The British Parliament introduced legislation in 2018 to require foreign owners to identify themselves in real estate purchases. The bill has not yet passed, but the registry is supposed to be made public by 2021. Owners who don’t comply could be sent to prison for two years or face fines. In Germany, lawmakers introduced a transparency registry in 2017 that requires all shell companies to list the real owner of any property. A failure to do so would result in a fine of $1.15 million.