Looks like at least some people are finally cluing in to the fact that jumping on the home ownership bandwagon might not be the best financial proposal out there and they’re better off renting.
After several years of flat rents and high vacancies, the local apartment market is tightening, thanks to folks like Seattleite Matt Rivett. He’s a 32-year-old aerospace engineer who ran the numbers on renting versus buying earlier this year after his first foray into house hunting.
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Why buy, he reasoned, when steep house prices and rising interest rates make owning so much costlier than renting. That wasn’t true a few years ago, and renters then chose ownership in droves.Instead Rivett’s happily committed to a rental duplex near Ballard that has “a beautiful view, all the amenities, for about half of what a mortgage would have been in a neighborhood further out, in a house I wasn’t particularly fond of,” he said.
Bucking the siren call of homeownership puts Rivett on the cusp of a trend that apartment expert Mike Scott says is one of the factors causing demand — and hence rents — to rise.
Okay, so rents are finally going to be creeping up in our fair town. Seems to me like they have quite a ways to go to catch up to housing, though. As Mr. Rivett points out, you can rent for quite a bit less than half of what a mortgage on a similar abode costs. Interestingly, the article cites the cause of increasing rental demand primarily as “the improving economy” and claims supply is being reduced due to “the condominium-conversion trend.” “High housing prices” are mentioned only as “another factor.” Well for this blogger they’re the factor.
(Elizabeth Rhodes, Seattle Times, 04.15.2006)