And the answer is, ding ding ding…

It all depends on where you live. The New York Times has come out with an article on how renting makes more sense in todays market, and if I had to guess it was written by a person who is renting. All of the examples were from areas that were overpriced and now on the decline.

What they did do was provide a cool tool that analyzes the rent versus buy equation and puts it into a graphical form. Click on the image to play with it, and leave a comment on how the market looks in your neck of the woods. I ran the numbers for my hometown and it worked out that buying in my town made more sense in 2 years of ownership. Not too shabby.

With the spring moving season under way, The New York Times has done an analysis of buying vs. renting in every major metropolitan area. The analysis includes data on housing costs and looks at different possibilities for the path of home prices in coming years.
It found that even though rents have recently jumped, the costs that come with buying a home — mortgage payments, property taxes, fees to real estate agents — remain a lot higher than the costs of renting. So buyers in many places are basically betting that home prices will rise smartly in the near future.
Over the next five years, which is about the average amount of time recent buyers have remained in their homes, prices in the Los Angeles area would have to rise more than 5 percent a year for a typical buyer there to do better than a renter. The same is true in Phoenix, Las Vegas, the New York region, Northern California and South Florida. In the Boston and Washington areas, the break-even point is about 4 percent.  New York Times.

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