Buy or rent?
It’s a common housing question, but one that has an answer in Seattle after sifting through the range of viral online “best-of” lists — it seems it is currently cheaper to buy property than rent an apartment in Seattle as the Emerald City continues to get more expensive to live in.
The annual-online-list is a data guru’s favorite PR trick. You’ve seen them going viral on the Internet stating the top towns for this, or the worst areas for that. But Seattle frequently appears — so surprise here — on such line ups when it comes to how increasingly expensive the area is to live. Line a couple of those up and it becomes clear that it is now cheaper to buy property in Seattle than to rent an apartment.
Related: One in five people in their 20s and early 30s are currently living with their parents
That’s quite a contrast from just five years ago when some were arguing the opposite.
Buying
According to mortgage website HSH.com, a person needs to make $77,529.01 per year in order to afford “the principal, interest, taxes and insurance payments on a median-priced home” in Seattle — assuming a buyer puts 20 percent down. It factors out to monthly payments of $1,809.01 on a home with a $383,100 price tag. And that earning threshold goes up to $90,805 per year if a buyer puts down 10 percent.
Seattle is inching up the list of expensive places to live in the United States. HSH.com notes that for