Yeah, and what the above is forgetting that most of the payment is interest. So it may have been no different than paying a landlord. My experience renting houses in the 2000’s was that my rent was about the same as my mortgage payment + taxes would have been for the same house. Add in maintenance and it was several hundred per month cheaper to rent. Even the house I live in now I rented prior to buying and my rent was 12% less than my monthly mortgage payment. It really only made sense for me to buy because my city was seeing 10% yoy rent increases that I expected for several more years, which meant locking in a price with a 30 fixed gave me and expected monthly savings.
The "old rule of thumb" was it took 5-7 years for the break-even on buying - if you were going to stay in the house less than 7 years renting would probably win, if you were staying more than buying would win. Of course appreciation and other factors change this; if houses are appreciating quickly buying will be better, if they're stagnate or dropping rental may be better (but then you can get rental inversions where the cost of renting goes way below or way above the cost of buying).
At some point buying is basically arbitrage between the mortgage rate and the inflation rate.
> buying is basically arbitrage between the mortgage rate and the inflation rate
It's a play on rental yield, i.e. rent versus price. Inflation is relevant, but more precisely considered as the cost of capital (opportunity cost of your down payment plus lost/gained yield on the difference between ownership costs and rent). Everything else is adjustments. Whether it's financed with a mortgage or cash is important, but the fundamental analysis still holds.
