Word: rented
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...significant number - but not everywhere. At TIME's request, Economy.com ran the numbers for 54 metro areas and compared their current price-to-rent ratios to what their ratios have been over the past 15 years. The result: in 21 cities, renting still looks to be the better bargain. Among the renter-friendly outposts are Baltimore; Raleigh and Charlotte, N.C.; Salt Lake City; San Antonio; Trenton, N.J.; Philadelphia; Honolulu; Seattle; and Portland...
...spectrum: the cities where houses for sale look inexpensive compared with rentals. The top 10 metro areas on that list are Cleveland, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Cincinnati and, in California, Oakland, Riverside, Sacramento, San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Jose. An important caveat: those cities' 15-year price-to-rent ratios include the bubble years. Does Las Vegas appear cheap? Sure. The current ratio there is 14.6, significantly below where it's been over the past 15 years (19.3). But that average has been influenced by the go-go years. Exclude them - by looking at just the 1990s...
...tangled in the numbers. "I wouldn't worry too much about a small amount above or below," says Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, who has done his own analysis of price-to-rent ratios. "It's when you see large divergences that it matters." After all, there are other considerations that go into the decision to buy a house. When Choe bought last fall, he figured the air was still coming out of real estate, but his older son was about to start kindergarten, and he wanted to settle into the right school...
...another example take, well, Dean Baker. He and his wife sold their condo in Washington in the spring of 2004 and started renting. The cost of a house relative to a typical apartment rent had doubled in four years - you didn't have to be an economist to notice. That spread has narrowed substantially, but by Baker's calculations, there's more to go. Yet that didn't stop him from buying a couple of months ago. "We got an interest rate at the absolute bottom," he says, "and we wanted outdoor space...
Plus, Baker plans to stay put for a while. That also influences the math on how financially savvy it is to buy. The government mortgage agency Ginnie Mae has a rent-vs.-buy calculator on its website - using the default settings, buying starts to make sense after committing to stay for at least four years, although a lot of assumptions go into that calculation: everything from the property-tax rate to mortgage closing costs to the money spent on homeowner's insurance to the yearly home-price appreciation. If prices stay flat instead of going up 2% a year...