Why house?

[Robino1]

Originally Posted by urbex

Look at most of the responses here - it's obviously assumed that renting automatically means apartment, and buying automatically assumes single family house. Most of the "benefits" of being a house owner can be realized by renting a house as well (and I look forward to the responses from people who can't differentiate between "most" and "all", lol), just as the financial benefits of owning a house can be realized by owning a condo or townhouse as well.

We've rented a single family home, a townhouse, an apartment and another single family house.

One good thing about about renting so many places, we got to know what we liked and didn't like. When we finally were in the place we want to stay, I knew what I liked in the finishes when we built this house.

We had jetted tubs in 2 of the rentals so we knew we wouldn't be using them so we opted for a larger shower only in the new build. The high end rental apartment had mahogany wood floors throughout. Killed my feet. I knew I wanted carpet in at least the bedrooms. Things like that.

[Yippeekayay]

Originally Posted by urbex

Look at most of the responses here - it's obviously assumed that renting automatically means apartment, and buying automatically assumes single family house. Most of the "benefits" of being a house owner can be realized by renting a house as well (and I look forward to the responses from people who can't differentiate between "most" and "all", lol), just as the financial benefits of owning a house can be realized by owning a condo or townhouse as well.

True but that is NOT the OPs intent on the question. He meant Ownership over Renting.

[Nov3]

It sure WASN'T for a mortgage payment.

We had one reason. An opportunity came up for us to put our skills into renovating an old home. We loved every challenge.

[AlaskaErik]

Originally Posted by urbex

Look at most of the responses here - it's obviously assumed that renting automatically means apartment, and buying automatically assumes single family house. Most of the "benefits" of being a house owner can be realized by renting a house as well (and I look forward to the responses from people who can't differentiate between "most" and "all", lol), just as the financial benefits of owning a house can be realized by owning a condo or townhouse as well.

If you rent the equivalent house, you're going to pay more. The landlord still needs to make his profit, as well as maintaining a contingency fund to pay for all the anticipated and unanticipated costs associated with owning a rental unit. And you're still at the mercy of a landlord. Even if you have a good one, eventually he will either sell or die. If you're going to live in a house, you might as well be the one building equity.

[urbex]

Originally Posted by AlaskaErik

If you rent the equivalent house, you're going to pay more. The landlord still needs to make his profit, as well as maintaining a contingency fund to pay for all the anticipated and unanticipated costs associated with owning a rental unit. And you're still at the mercy of a landlord. Even if you have a good one, eventually he will either sell or die. If you're going to live in a house, you might as well be the one building equity.

and there's the first one that doesn't know the difference between most and all

But hey, since the financial aspect always comes into play...ask all those people that bought houses in '07/'08 how well that equity building has been going for them My parents are looking at taking a roughly 100K loss on the house that they just put up for sale...

[Coldjensens]

1. I wanted a space to call my own where I could do improvements, make changes as I desired and where i would benefit from the improvements I made. Where we could have a dog, plant a tree, build a fence, change out appliances without having to get permission.

2. I wanted to get into the housing market before we got completely priced out (I was correct), and I realized rent was going to skyrocket, so we needed to lock in a mortgage payment we could almost afford before escalating rent broke us.

3. Investment and tax deduction.It was obvious where home prices were going in our area (Orange County CA) it was an insanely fabulous investment that you could also live in. We also needed payments and escalating prices to build equity so we could transfer our student loans to a lower interest secured loan where we could write off the interest on our taxes. It appeared to be the only way we would ever get out of student loan debt.

[Coldjensens]

Originally Posted by AlaskaErik

If you rent the equivalent house, you're going to pay more. The landlord still needs to make his profit, as well as maintaining a contingency fund to pay for all the anticipated and unanticipated costs associated with owning a rental unit. And you're still at the mercy of a landlord. Even if you have a good one, eventually he will either sell or die. If you're going to live in a house, you might as well be the one building equity.

We lived for a time in a little cottage one row of houses away from the beach in Newport Beach California. It was owned by an older couple who really liked us when we met them. They set the rent low. They just wanted their three rentals to generate enough to pay the bills for them and when rent prices went crazy they kept ours low and did not raise it at all. Ultimately we were paying $900 a month for a house that was probably worth several million on the market at the time because of its location. But they had bought it long ago for a song, and their taxes were low due to prop 13, so they just did not raise the rent.

Then they died. Almost at the same time.

The heirs wanted $4,000 a month for winter only rental and we had to move out for the summer because during summer they could rent it for close to $4000 a day. They were overreaching and got about half that at first, but we had to leave.