Doesn't fit my utility function, unfortunately. First of all, there is no real public transportation to where my house is (Gardiner, NY). There is a Trailways bus ($43.50 round trip), but the bus stop is in New Paltz, NY, some 20 min cab ride to my house. So, at 4 weekends a month, (43.50 bus fare + 20x2 cab fare) * 4 would add up to 334 dollars a month. Cheaper then my parking, but considering that it would add an extra hour each way and make it a proper production, the extra 166 dollars aren't worth the pain. PS. What I used to do is park a bit further uptown in Spanish Harlem, which was break-even at 300/month, but that garage closed down.
I think you are confusing construction companies (whos business is to build) with residential real estate companies. To give you a counter-example, NYC and London are full of tenements of various degree of luxury, for example, and those places are wildly profitable. Rental holdings are pretty profitable, especially the ones geared toward lower tiers of society - I have an investment in a trailer park that has been yielding roughly 12.5% for the past 11 years. On the other hand, a condo owner in NYC, while not achieving economy of scale, on average gets a rental yield of 2.5% on his property after maintenance and taxes (RE tax deduction not included). Even assuming zero appreciation, it's still better then TIPS. Are you taking RE as total return or price return (which is what you usually see)? Cause real estate also pays "dividend" which is also known as "rent" which most studies ignore. However, real estate should be more properly compared to some sort of inflation protected bonds and it tends to do better (while showing a comparable degree of volatility). Finally, don't forget, that, as assets go, it's one of the few assets that can survive an economic meltdown to some degree. Pretty much every country (even the US, though it was a technical default on the war bonds) have defaulted on their debt in the past 200 years. Pretty much every country has experienced massive equity meltdowns in the same period, in some cases with no recovery of the original index. Yet real estate owners in those countries have done OK in the long run. PPS. I have plenty of friends that rent, plenty that own. Also, have a few that own a place, rent it out and renting one themselves. The economics of rent vs own are so complex that it would take a separate thread and probably will be different for each country.
Nne of them is wildly profitable ad you claim. Please list a publicly traded company that makes a fortune buying property and then renting it out. They don't exist. Sam Zell knows that better than anyone. He buys up cheap shitty properties, remodels them and then rents out or sells. Entirely different business.
Why don't you show the study? Cause I can show a few REITs with nice yields that have high rental content. Apparently, those companies get income somehow.
Nice yields? Don't make us laugh. You claimed a few pages ago they beat a broad based stock index. That is total nonsense
If your corporate background was finance, then talk about finance. If your corporate background was working at a boot factory, then perhaps you know less about finance than some others here. Like .. Would you trust a mechanic to do dental work?
Well whether renting is more costly than owning really depends on the return you can earn with the funds besides your rent vs. the return you can earn on your house that you have borrowed to buy. It has nothing to do with whether the actual amount of rent is higher or lower than all the housing cost. Owning a house with mortgage is really borrowing to invest in a house. From a cash flow point of view, it's rent vs mortgage payments + property tax + repair so at the end of the day, if your house is able to earn you a net return after all the housing cost higher than what you can earn on an investment that you have invested all your spare funds after deducting rent, then owning a house is obviously cheaper than renting even if the housing cost is more expensive. But even if the rent is more expensive than all the housing cost but if the investment return from investing all the spare funds outside of the rent is so high that it's much higher than the appreciation of a house, then renting would be cheaper at the end. So I guess a third alternative solution to this housing crisis is investing all the spare funds outside of the rent, if any, in an extremely high return investment like starting your own .com business so that way you will be able to come on on top over those pesky foreign real estate buyers.
I agree home ownership is more favoured in the US than other countries from at least tax point of view. Mortgage interest is tax-deductible is a major help. I don't know why the stupid CRA in Canada doesn't allow it. It would've given major boost to the housing industry here.
The only risk to home ownership is 1) owning in a place that is too dependent on ONE major industry or company like in Detroit and those mining towns. Once that one major industry or company goes bust than whatever home you own suffers a major loss in value and/or 2) buying into the wrong stage of the economic cycle like at the end of 2007 at the height of the housing bubble and then once the bubble burst in 2008, the housing value went down with it. Other than those 3 extreme scenarios, house ownership is pretty much a sound investment unless like I said before, you can earn even higher returns from other investment while renting.
OMG!!! You only pay 28% tax on a $160K income???!!! And only 35% combined with Fed. tax rate??!!! In Canada that $160K is going to garner you a 45% tax rate on average, Fed + Prov. combined. Oh God, I gotta move to the US. And you guys actually wanted to immigrate to Canada if Trump gets elected??! LOL Forget about the weather, you guys wouldn't even be able to handle our taxes. LOL