As someone who owend, then was adamantly against owning, and is back to owning I'm going to chime in here in address a bunch of things I'm seeing come up here:
1. Renting vs buying is 100% dependent on the current factors & situation of your life. A young adult without a clear career path would be better off renting so they can have the flexibility to move around. If you're a family then it becomes a bit more difficult to always find accomidating rental that fits your needs; this isn't always true but for man it is.
2. "You can just invest" -- yes, you can just invest but many people whom rent DO NOT make those investments. It's an assumption of taking X in your mortgage and paying it into investment vehicles. How many people can find another 500-1000 in funds to do this? Not many at all.
3. You buy a home for stability, that's it. For the most part you end up in a stable home situation and your costs should not increase too much beyond tax adjustments.
4. Maintenance costs are absolutely a factor that people need to consider when buying a home, but many of you are completely blowing out proportion the severity of things. Appliances? C'mon, these are not major cost breakers if you do them 1 at a time. Your HVAC & roof should at best need ONE replacement over the span of your ownership (roofs have lifespans of 20 years, HVAC can go 15-20). With new hot water heaters & maintenance they can easily go 10-15 years now and they're not cost breakers. Anything else beyond this such as landscaping or renovations are entirely on the home owner and not reqirements. Meaning, not all home owners look to spend 10K on landscaping but some love doing the work so it's a hobby and thus a value prop for them.
5. Homes are only investments in the sense that they're long term savings accounts (whomever made this analogy was spot on). Many people 'fail' with home owning because they get way too emotionally attached to the idea of making money on their home. Unless you're buying a multi-family or a second home, the home you actually live in should not be seen as an "investment".
6. On that same tip, in hot markets most home improvements do not have great return on investment. That 30K kitchen rennovation isn't going to suddenly add 30K to your home. At best it makes your house more appealing to the prospective buyers in the market. All those HGTV shows that make it seem like you can quadrouple your home value are ridiculous and that happens because they're buying houses way below market value. We're planning a rennovation of 270sq feet to convert an outdoor florida room to living space and it will run ~60K. We know for a fact this wont suddenly bump our house up but the investment is for ourselves and our time here; obviously long term it helps.
7. New vs old homes -- this comes a whole lot but a lot of newer constructions are absolute shit. Look up Ryan Homes and you'll see a lot of people with a list of issues in their houses. So buying an older house can actually be beneficial.
8. In highly competitive home markets renting can be really beneficial. Bay Area, NYC, where homes are in the millions and the cost of a down payment could be 100K it's just financially more sound to rent out.
No, you have to read and understand what market you're buying into. It's not luck that buying a house in the Bay Area in 2005 meant your house value increased. It was painfully obvious it would go up. What's luck is someone who bought in maybe the 70s and now has a house worth $2 million. That's luck, but someone in 2005? It was damn obvious the market was good here and for the foreseeable future.
The only way I'll put pause on this is some people in here saying "My house went up 100K-200K in 5 years". That's insane value add in such a short time and will not conitnue long term, if anything it should flatten out. The outliers to this are obviously the major metro hubs (Dallas, Bay Area, Seattle, NYC, Boston, Denver, Austin, etc) but in most cases that is 100% not normal.
