In a free market, rent will always be higher than cost of a property. If it were less, the property is an unprofitable investment and should be divested. This article drops critical context. 10 years ago, one of the earliest and most potent warning signs of the coming collapse was the extreme disparity between rents and mortgages. Home prices skyrocketed while rents remained relatively flat. And just a couple years b…
Renting out a property that you own can still be a long-term beneficial investment so long as the rental costs exceed the costs of borrowing on a mortgage – and that's typically much, much lower than the value of the actual mortgage payments being made. Capital growth potential is a valid reason that people may choose to invest in property, and in a market where there are many rental properties to choose from it's quite possible that rents remain below the prevailing capital repayment + interest that a mortgage would require.
But really it's hard to understand exactly what the point being made in this article is – it seems to be primarily that the "total amount" of rent being paid is now approaching parity with the "total amount" of payments being made by homeowners. I can't tell if that includes capital repayments, or if it's even accounting for an increase in renters vs. homeowners. There's basically no useful information there.