141–150 of 151 posts
I have come to the conclusion that buying to occupy is no longer a rational decision. Consider a grid. On one axis, housing purchases are cheap or expensive. On the other axis, the local economy is vibrant or moribund. Hence: * Cheap + Vibrant: Basically doesn't exist. * Cheap + Moribund: Bad place to buy, you're tied to a high-risk location. * Expensive + Vibrant: Purchase cost will eat up the advantage of the local…
I have come to the conclusion that buying to occupy is no longer a rational decision. Consider a grid. On one axis, housing purchases are cheap or expensive. On the other axis, the local economy is vibrant or moribund. Hence: * Cheap + Vibrant: Basically doesn't exist. * Cheap + Moribund: Bad place to buy, you're tied to a high-risk location. * Expensive + Vibrant: Purchase cost will eat up the advantage of the local…
If you don't mind the stress and time, and are capable of selling quickly in a falling market, perhaps you should decide to buy when you're more than willing to bear the huge round-trip within 3 years transaction costs (scaled by your estimated probability of this happening).
I'm from Australia but now live in NYC and I've been debating the question about whether to buy or rent. It's amusing to me to see a big red circle on this graphic for NYC. I can understand why. NYC is a special case in many ways. For one thing, from a purely financial perspective, your best bet is to find a rent stabilized apartment that is well under market value and then invest your money elsewhere, possibly on bu…
This was the fallacy that got the US into so much trouble. When real estate rises quickly and consistently, people think it's a guaranteed perpetuity. That's not the case. Any investment can go down in value and almost surely will at some point in time.
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Generalising enormously, the capital cities are already perched in the best locations. A successful city needs two major things: ready access to water and ready access to trade. That's why most major cities are on rivers or around major harbours. Take my home town Darwin, for example. It is not destined to be one of the world's great cities because it is poorly positioned. There's buckets of water but due to the flat…
This type of thinking doesn't explain Houston, Las Vegas, Phoenix - the list goes on. These are large cities by Australian standards but fit very few of your criteria. Las Vegas depends on the Hoover Dam, but certainly not trade or shipping. Water supply is the major issue in Australian cities, but this can be solved (see Kalgoorlie) if people put their mind to it. I agree that Australia needs to develop the regional…
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My point is that you're taking on significant risk with a cavalier attitude. Let me try another: > if rates soar that means the economy has recovered and your house is worth more You realize that LTCM went bankrupt betting on asset price correlations?
Well, the intention was not to be cavalier , but to try to ignore the risk side of the equation as much as possible, because thats what Trulia did, so the analysis could be comparable. Having read all the subsequent comments regarding risk, I now see that what I should have said is comparing renting to buying on a _cost only_ basis, w/o considering the differences in risk, is not a helpful analysis. I still stand by…
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This is a great infographic idea, but the census 'incorporated city' boundaries/populations is not that good of a data set for this use case. Metropolitan statistical areas would've been a more reasonable choice here, since in many cities the city proper (as defined by incorporated bounds) is either vastly under or vastly over-priced compared to where people actually live, not to mention throwing off the relative pop…
The difference between metropolitan statistical areas and cities is particularly noticeable with respect to Miami. The city itself is only the 42nd largest in the country (population 450K) but the MSA (which includes Fort Lauderdale and many suburbs) is the country's 7th-largest (population 5M+).
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The top cities for buy/rent ratios are not necessarily the largest. And I know quite a few people who own properties in other countries who are neither rich nor European. One was an English IT contractor living in Australia who bought a small property in Auckland. Your "domestic" is not the same as everyone else's.
It's the buy/rent ratios of the top 50 largest cities, not the 50 cities with the best buy/rent ratio. As for it not having US in the title. It is a .com. Technically that means it is in the US. If it was "Rent vs Buy, Top Cities" on Trulia.co.uk, I would not have clicked through becuase I would have known they were not talking about the US. I don't see why every single time someone posts something they need to quali…
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Houston is actually the 2nd biggest port in the USA and 6th biggest in the world. It's also surrounded by oil and natural gas. Phoenix and Vegas are weird ones, but most large cities in the USA are on a big lake, river or ocean, or some combination of those.
My bad with Houston. I must have been thinking of Dallas. The factor with Las Vegas and Phoenix are that they are modern growth cities. You don't need a deepwater port to facilitate growth in a modern city, just a good airport, good road/rail links and good communications infrastructure. You could argue that Phoenix is propelled by retirees and golf players and Las Vegas by gambling - but the reason doesn't matter, j…
To cover myself, refer again to my prefatory remark that I was generalising enormously.
I was hoping to see how affordable it is to buy in different cities around the world. Unfortunately, this data covers 50 cities in just one country. It should really be the "Top 50 Cities in the US". The US-centric nature of websites like this is even more irritating when they don't state it up front.
This would also require you to factor in exchange rates, but I guess that's not much of a problem when done as a snapshot view.
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Amusingly, there are media stories here in Australia about people working in Australia and buying property in the US. Might have the details wrong, but one woman had sold an investment property (in Darwin maybe?) and bought five apartments (in Florida, I think?) in the US with that money.
I'm thinking about doing it. Positively geared properties sound very enticing.