[rainyMammoth]

Even with the leverage, it is in most cases still not a good investment. There are a lot of calculator out there that shows you the break even point between renting and buying.

You forget all the horrible fees that come with owning a place (HOA, maintenance, property taxes, 6% lost to agents at every transaction)

[majormajor]

For me, those calculators tell me I'm better off buying if I'm gonna stay for at least 5-7 years. Which is... not a terribly long amount of time, honestly. If I'd made the buying decision 5 years ago, I would've actually been much better off by then, because my rent went up way more than predicted. So of course there's a lot of uncertainty there. Maybe purchase prices will crash soon. Or maybe we hit a new normal and individual homes or spacious townhomes never come back down in price, due to shifts in demand.

My rent means that there are tens of thousands of dollars a year that I'll never be able to invest in anything. So even if I had a better investment option than taking a 5x (or more!) leverage multiplier on a downpayment, it would still have to overcome a pretty big disadvantage right there to come out ahead in the long run.

[matmatmatmat]

I did this math recently for a real estate investment. We're in a pretty hot market, but not growing at anywhere near the pace of Atlanta or Austin. Suffice it to say that if the property appreciates at merely the inflation rate, it will have the same return as a typical index fund, with a better tax disposition.

[alisonkisk]

Buying is a near perfectly good investment (sadly). Selling is almost the only way to lose money in real estate.