Buy vs. Rent

Since I've got married about a year ago I've been very interested in the economics of real estate market. In particular the more imperial side of things. I religiously check on the local blog sphere about the latest data on listing and price on different areas of the city. I always have the believe that when someone trying to tell me something without data backing up their claim is simply advice I cannot trust. This goes for personal relation as well as information from news media.

Well today I ran into this really cool tool from NY Times that help people decide whether it is better to buy a house and enjoy home ownership; or keep paying rent and enjoy the lower living cost. The answer it turns out is base on whole bunch of variables but with this tool from NY Times it's easy to figure out the answer.

For me, it turns out that it's still better for me to keep renting our current 1 bedroom apartment until two things happen:

1. Our circumstances change in such a way that we need more place and therefore have a significant rent increase AND
2. The housing price have a -10% adjustment.

It's hard to say whether these things will happen soon but at least our decision to rent and wait was a good call.

Obviously with the US housing bubble there is no shortage of blog to read about the topics of real estate market. However I am mostly concern about the Vancouver BC market and as mentioned above I'm mostly interest with raw data rather then opinion alone. So here is my plug for the similar minds on the Canadian west coast:

• The Best Real Estate Anywhere!
  
• Financial Planning and Personal Sanity
• PaulB