A Word of Advice During a Housing Slump: Rent – New York Times
But in a stark reversal, it’s now clear that people who chose renting over buying in the last two years made the right move. In much of the country, including large parts of the Northeast, California, Florida and the Southwest, recent home buyers have faced higher monthly costs than renters and have lost money on their investment in the meantime. It’s almost as if they have thrown money away, an insult once reserved for renters.Most striking, perhaps, is the fact that prices may not yet have fallen far enough for buying to look better than renting today, except for people who plan to stay in a home for many years.

With the spring moving season under way, The New York Times has done an analysis of buying vs. renting in every major metropolitan area. The analysis includes data on housing costs and looks at different possibilities for the path of home prices in coming years.

It found that even though rents have recently jumped, the costs that come with buying a home — mortgage payments, property taxes, fees to real estate agents — remain a lot higher than the costs of renting. So buyers in many places are basically betting that home prices will rise smartly in the near future.

Over the next five years, which is about the average amount of time recent buyers have remained in their homes, prices in the Los Angeles area would have to rise more than 5 percent a year for a typical buyer there to do better than a renter. The same is true in Phoenix, Las Vegas, the New York region, Northern California and South Florida.

Did you catch the mistake there?

Yep… this ignorant MSM writer lumped Northern California with Las Vegas, Phoenix, New York and South Florida.

Uh, hello. This is the San Francisco Bay Area – it’s special here.

Why are you trying to confuse your readers? Everyone knows they don’t have smart people, good weather, sushi, good weather, burritos, good weather, Great Mall, good weather, El Camino Real, good weather, world class universities, good weather, or diversity in any of those places.

And clearly this writer didn’t do enough research – what about interviewing experts like Byron Alvarez:

Byron Alvarez of the REMAX Real Estate Center, a 27-year real estate veteran, expects prices to jump by 10 percent or more in 2008.

“We’re going to be sitting here 4 or 5 years from now when we’re at the peak of the up cycle saying: ‘Remember ‘06 and ‘07?’ We should have been buying everything on the market,” Alvarez said.

Who are you going to trust? Some snooty east coast hack? Or your local real estate expert?

5%? Peh. 10%’s in the bag baby.