Take Your Mortgage Rate With You? Plus 256 Homes Proposed in Hudson and Kingston

There is a bill in Congress that would let you carry your mortgage rate to your next house. New Hampshire quietly changed what you are allowed to build on commercially zoned land. Hudson has a 116-apartment proposal on Central Street, and Kingston has one for up to 140 homes off Route 125. And if you have been telling yourself you will list after Labor Day, there is a number near the bottom you should read first.

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The mortgage that moves with you

Here is the idea. You bought in 2021 at 2.9%. You would move if moving did not mean handing that rate back and taking whatever the market is charging today. A bill introduced in the House on August 3 goes straight at that problem.

H.R. 10028, the MOVE Act, would direct Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to begin purchasing and securitizing conventional mortgages that let a borrower transfer the interest rate, the terms and the remaining balance to a new property within 90 days of selling the original one. The bill gives them 180 days to start, if it becomes law.

It has not become law. It was introduced August 3, referred to the House Committee on Financial Services, and has not moved since. That is the whole action history.

I am covering it anyway, for two reasons. The first is that you will start hearing about portable mortgages, and it is worth knowing what is actually on the table before someone pitches it to you as a product. The second is that the bill text leaves out most of what would decide whether this is useful. It does not establish whether existing mortgages would qualify. It does not address what happens when the new house costs more than the old loan balance, which is nearly always. It does not set underwriting or appraisal standards, and it does not spell out fees or servicing.

Real problem, interesting proposal, no product. If your plan for the next few years depends on keeping a low rate through a move, do not build that plan around this bill.

You can build housing on commercial land now

RSA 674:80 took effect July 1. In plain terms, a New Hampshire municipality now has to allow multifamily residential development on qualifying commercially zoned land where roads, water and sewage are adequate or will be provided.

The statute itself is not the interesting part. What is interesting is that it kills a sentence people have been using to end conversations for years. “It is zoned commercial” used to be the final answer on whether a property could hold housing. It is not the final answer anymore.

That is a long way from saying every strip plaza is now an apartment site. Municipalities keep their site-plan authority. The law carves out commercial zones that permit incompatible industrial or manufacturing uses, deals with ground-floor commercial requirements, and handles adaptive reuse separately. Two more 2026 chapters sit alongside it. HB 1010 became Chapter 319 and revised the infrastructure and planning-board framework. HB 1588 became Chapter 329 and added housing, parking, adaptive-reuse and infrastructure provisions on their own effective dates.

If you own commercial land, or you are looking at a tired retail building and doing math in your head, the question has turned into a checklist:

I am a REALTOR, not an attorney, and this is reporting rather than an opinion on your parcel. But it is worth an hour with somebody who can answer it properly, because the answer changed in July and most owners have not noticed.

Hudson, NH116 apartments proposed on Central Street

The Meadows is a 116-apartment proposal on 26.12 acres at 207 Central Street. Four buildings: three residential, one combining residential and commercial space. Town materials describe 278 parking spaces, public water and sewer, and the usual package of new access, drainage, utilities, landscaping and lighting. The applicant is Meadow Properties, LLC. The site is Map 176, Lots 41, 44 and 45, in Business and General-1 zoning.

The review record identifies open items: wetland-buffer conditional-use review, flood-zone conditions, and peer-review comments. Those are comments sitting in a municipal file. They are not decisions.

The Planning Board heard the project on August 26. As of today Hudson has not posted minutes, a decision, or a project-specific next hearing. So I am not going to tell you where it stands, because the public record does not say. Not approved, not denied, not continued, as far as anyone outside that room can verify.

I would rather leave the status blank than fill it with a guess. The moment the town posts, it goes on the tracker. Full details and timeline for The Meadows.

Kingston, NHUp to 140 homes proposed off Route 125

Liberty Common covers roughly 85 acres at 225, 229 and 231 Route 125 plus 50 Depot Road. The filing proposes up to 140 condominium homes across four building types: duplex, townhouse, quadplex and multifamily flats. Private wells and subsurface disposal rather than municipal utilities, about 11,300 feet of internal road, and primary access from Depot Road.

The status needs exact language, so here it is. On May 5, Kingston’s Planning Board granted the conditional-use permit and the waiver requests. Those are verified decisions. They are not approval of the subdivision or the site plan. That hearing remained continued through August 18, the August 18 outcome has not been posted, and Liberty Common was not on the September 1 agenda.

Partly decided, not approved. If you hear someone say Liberty Common got approved back in May, they are describing the conditional-use permit and leaving out everything else. State items are still open in the filing as well: NHDES alteration-of-terrain, wetland, subdivision and septic matters, plus an NHDOT driveway permit.

Full details and timeline for Liberty Common.

What the MLS knows: September is the worst month to list

Sellers keep telling me they will wait until after Labor Day. I understand why it feels right. Fall reads like a fresh start, the kids are back in school, everybody is home from vacation.

It is the worst call on the calendar.

Last April, 2,095 homes came to market here. Last September, 2,056. Practically the same number of houses competing for the same attention.

What happened to them was not the same at all. Of the April listings, 85.5% eventually sold, at 101.0% of the original asking price, with 22.9% needing a price cut. September: 79.9% sold, at 99.0% of ask, with 31.8% cutting. Same volume, same kind of houses, worse on every measure.

The difference is who is shopping. September drops a spring-sized pile of inventory on the weakest buyer pool of the year. Maximum competition, minimum demand. You do not want to be the fourth similar house to hit the market inside three weeks.

If you are on the fence about listing right now, that is the trade you are making. It is not a reason to panic and it is not a reason to rush. It is a reason to get the price right the first time, because September leaves you far less room to be wrong than April did.

These come out of my own analysis of 25,201 closed sales across Southern New Hampshire, the Merrimack Valley and the North Shore. You can look up your own town and price band on my market intelligence page.

What I am watching

The MOVE Act has to actually move before it means anything to a borrower. New Hampshire’s commercial-zone law is already in effect, so that one is real today, though what it means for any specific parcel still comes down to the district, the infrastructure and the site review. Hudson and Kingston both need their towns to post a record before anybody can honestly say where those projects stand.

There are twenty projects across twelve towns on the development tracker right now, from a 100-home concept in Chester to a six-unit faculty housing project in Exeter. If you have been wondering whether the thing behind your house is still happening, that is where I keep the answer current.