Something I've noticed is that some cities are better for renters, and others are better for buyers.

My current city in central Europe is very renter-friendly. A nice apartment would cost $600k, but rents practically never exceed $1500/month. Under such circumstances an apartment doesn't seem like a great investment.

I've also lived, briefly, in Canada -- where rents were often extremely high relative to home prices. (I have a friend who pays $300/month on a mortgage and rents the place out for $2000/month. At the same time, the house has nearly tripled in value over the past ~7 years.)

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al_borland a day ago | parent [-]

I saw this when I lived in the Chicagoland area. A co-worker was giving me the business for renting instead of buying something. The he let it slip that his property tax alone was $35k/year, almost 2x what I was paying in rent, and that didn’t even include the mortgage.

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tomjakubowski a day ago | parent | next [-]

Surely this must not have been a like-for-like comparison, unless your landlord is very charitable or somehow secured a much lower property tax rate than your coworker did (as is possible in California through various Prop 13 mechanisms). Have you looked up what the property tax bill is on your apartment?

	▲	al_borland a day ago \| parent [-]
		He had a nice house in an expensive area. I think his wife was someone important at a bank. I was in a one bedroom apartment, so not like-for-like, but I didn’t need or want anymore space than I had. I was also in a nice area, and in the nicest apartments in that area, as far as I could tell. A couple people who moved out there when I did bought places, and I heard nothing but regrets from them a year later.

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tptacek a day ago | parent | prev [-]

That's an enormously high property tax bill for Chicagoland. I live in Oak Park, famously one of the highest-taxed areas in the county, in a relatively large house, and my taxes are not close to that (more than $10k less).

I don't doubt you or your friend, but their situation was unique.

	▲	al_borland a day ago \| parent [-]
		I think he was in Oak Park. I drove by his place once. He has a pretty good size corner lot. That said, he was often trying to show off, so who knows.