[bombcar]

Yes, a moment's thought should reveal that this is the case.

Buying and selling a house costs about 10% (or more) (realtors, expenses, etc). So if you buy a house today for $200k, and sell it tomorrow for $200k you will lose about $20k. (Yes, there are flipping tricks and stuff you can do to reduce that, but there are costs for normal transactions.)

So the rule of thumb is "about seven years" - if you buy today, and sell in seven years, appreciation and such will "break even". Certainly if appreciation was insanely high, that will be a shorter period, if it is bad or a crash happens, it may be longer or even underwater.

But whatever the time period is, if you will not live in the house for that number of years, you're better off renting, unless rental prices are so high as to invert it.

Another example of this is where businesses often prefer to lease (even so far as to triple-net) for tax purposes and to free up capital.

[skyyler]

>88% of Americans would rather own a home than rent. Specifically, 76% of renters would rather own a home, but only 2% of homeowners would rather rent.

https://www.lendingtree.com/home/mortgage/homeownership-rent...

[bombcar]

I suppose most homeowners that want to rent sell and become renters, so we can deduce that 20-24% of renters actually want to rent, and some percentage of the remainder might go back to renting if they had a bad ownership experience.

Though some percentage of those renters are in highly favorable situations, like rent-controlled units that would be insanely more expensive on the open market.

[skyyler]

>I suppose most homeowners that want to rent sell and become renters

I see, so maybe selling isn't that big of a hassle then? People keep bringing it up as evidence that people would rather rent, but that really doesn't seem to be the case.

[bombcar]

Selling is a huge hassle, but it's not something that prevents you from doing something the way not having money prevents you from buying.

[skyyler]

Very interesting!

So people that want to own are often reduced to renting, yet people that want to rent can easily sell to do so?

How fascinating.