For a long time, the common wisdom was that buying a home was a far better financial choice than renting one. Throughout the second half of the 20th century, and into the first years of the new millennium, home prices across much of the country marched steadily upwards, and a house was considered the safest investment around. The logic was simple: if you were spending 30 percent of your income on housing anyway, might as well spend that hard-earned dough on something that would retain its value for you in the future. Renting, in contrast, was like lighting your money on fire and tossing it in the trash. The rent versus buy decision was a straightforward one.
That all changed in 2007, when the housing bubble that had been silently growing suddenly went pop. A house, it turned out, could lose value—and, as some real-life cases demonstrated, could do so in spectacular fashion. There were stories of totally abandoned neighborhoods outside of Las Vegas, and half-constructed mansions in Florida. Those with the misfortune to buy at the peak of the market in 2006 lost thousands or even millions of dollars overnight. Mortgages went underwater. A foreclosure crisis ensued. Meanwhile, the renters of the world were doing relatively well.
Today, there is no clear answer to the rent v buy question. In some cities, and for some individuals, buying a home may make more sense, while for others, renting a home may be the better choice. What makes sense for Nina in New Orleans and Steve in San Diego may not make sense for Dan in Denver and Christina in Chicago. So how does one decide the answer to this question of, Should I rent or buy?
Where a Rent vs. Buy Calculator Can Help
Perhaps the most important factor to consider when making this buy or rent decision is how long you plan to stay in your home. If you’ll only be in town a year, renting will almost always be your obvious best choice. If you’re planning on packing up and leaving 12 months down the line, you probably don’t want to spend the time and money necessary to buy a house: think down payment, closing costs, loan charges, appraisal fees and so on. All told, the upfront costs of finding a house and taking out a mortgage can be in the tens of thousands of dollars (or higher!). As a renter, at worst you’ll have to pay a small application fee and make a refundable security deposit of a few months’ rent.
On the other hand, if you plan on staying put for 50 years, renting almost always makes no sense. In the long run, there are significant advantages to homeownership, one of the largest being the mortgage interest deduction, a tax benefit that allows you to deduct mortgage interest payments from your taxable income. For example, if you have a $2,000 monthly mortgage payment, and $1,500 of that goes toward interest, you can deduct that $1,500. So, your taxable income will be $1,500 lower. If we assume you pay a marginal tax rate of 30 percent, you would pay about $450 less in taxes each month by taking that deduction (30% x $1,500 = $450).
Rental payments, in contrast have no such advantages. Indeed, while a portion of each mortgage payment goes toward increasing your stake in your home by increasing your equity, rental payments go entirely to your landlord, and tend to grow over time. In the long run, the costs of renting can be much higher than buying.
So, if renting is better in the short-run and buying is better in the long run, when does the financial logic switch? When, in other words, do the long-run costs of renting begin to outweigh the upfront costs of buying? It could be three years, or seven or 15. The timing depends largely on where you live. That’s why our rent vs. buy analysis is location-based.
Should I buy or rent? Rent vs. Buy Examples
As the saying goes: all real estate is local. That has never been truer than it is today. Some housing markets are booming and others are stagnant, and while in some cities rents have taken off, in others they remain as low as ever.
Take Atlanta, for example. Home prices there rose by about 4.4 percent over the past three years, while rents on two-bedroom apartments jumped 3.4% over the same time period. At those rates, it would likely make more sense for a person looking for a typical two bedroom home to buy if she planned on staying just two years.
In a city like San Francisco, where a typical house can sell for upwards of $500,000, the math can look a little different but the results are the same. Rents in San Francisco have jumped a whopping 8% in the past year, and home prices rose even more rapidly than that, by over 10% according to the Case-Schiller Index. If those rates hold, a San Franciscan staying in town for more than two years should buy now—if she can afford it.
New York City is a different story. Home prices in New York’s notoriously difficult housing market rose just 1.45 percent over the past three years, while rents over that period rose by around 5%. Even if you were able to find a two-bedroom for $350,000, it would only make financial sense to purchase it if you planned on staying put for a full 18 years.
The Big Apple is a big outlier when it comes to your rent or buy decision, however. Most cities in the U.S. are like Minneapolis, where home prices have risen 7 percent over the past three years, and rent for the average two bedroom apartment has gone from $960 to just over $1000, a 4.3 percent increase. In Minneapolis, a person looking for a typical house should buy if he plans on staying at least two years and has the money available for the upfront costs. The lesson here? When asking Should I rent or buy a house? be sure to take your location into account.
Reasons You Might Want to Rent or Buy a House
Of course, while analyses like the above assume you are making your decision for purely economic reasons, there are other, non-financial factors that you may want to think about as well when wondering Should I buy or rent a house? Many renters, for example, enjoy the flexibility of being able to change pads at the end of their lease. For a homeowner, if you want to move, there’s quite a few hoops to jump through: find a real estate agent, get the house listed, meet with prospective buyers, accept bids, make a deal and, eventually, pay a bunch of fees to close the sale. Getting all of that done can take months, and can be very expensive.
On the other hand, buying a home gives you year-to-year continuity. Rents can change drastically over the course of just a few years, and there’s the ever-looming threat of eviction if a rent increase proves too much for you to afford. Most of the time as a homeowner, you won’t face any spikes in your payment (adjustable-rate mortgages are one exception), and you won’t have to worry about being tossed out on the street if your payment becomes too expensive.
Then there’s the question of maintenance: fixing leaky pipes, painting, cleaning gutters—these are all costs of owning a home, but many homeowners enjoy putting time and energy into their homes. By the same token, many renters complain of unresponsive landlords who refuse to deal with things like bad plumbing or a faulty fridge. These matters of personal preference are the intangibles that even the best rent or buy calculator (see above) can’t account for. Answering the question of Should I rent or buy a home? may require some soul-searching.
In the end, the rent vs. buy decision comes down to your preferences and plans. If you know exactly how long you want to stay in your home and where you want to live, and you have some money saved up, the decision could be as easy as calculating which option will cost you less. If your future is less clear, however, you may have more to consider.
