Why can’t we rent a house for the rest of our lives?

“Why do I have to buy a house? No one is forcing you to buy a house with a gun. Let me give you an example. In Beijing, I can rent a very good house for 10,000 yuan a month. If I get tired of living there and change my job, I can rent another house. If I buy a house in the same location, I will have to spend at least 6 million! This money is enough for me to live in a second-hand house for 50 years. Property rights are only for 50 years, right?"

What he said made sense, and Mr. Cai Cai was speechless.

However, when I think about it carefully, I feel something is wrong - your 6 million is not static money. Even Martians know that houses in Beijing have been rising. Even if you ignore the investment attribute of buying a house, We can’t ignore the fact that rents will change with housing prices, right? Can your salary rise more than the rent?

So, whether we can rent a house for the rest of our lives is, in a sense, an arithmetic problem.

We all know that buying a house has strong investment attributes, while renting a house can only be counted as consumption, so the two apply to different economic logics - the price of consumer goods is positively related to the average social income.

For example:

If you achieve a small goal in Beijing and earn 100 million, you are considered rich, right? But you still need to shop online and receive express delivery, right? You need someone. Cook and clean for you? These people who provide you with services also need to live in this city, so this city is bound to have a place where they can afford the rent to live - "Beijing Folding" after all Not reality.

In first-tier cities in China, the cost we spend on renting a house every month is about 1/3 of our salary. No matter how housing prices rise, you will find that the ratio of rent/per capita salary has always been stable. In other words, it has a ceiling - in the absence of drastic changes in housing prices, if wages rise a little, rents will also rise a little. In the future, if the national wage falls or the unemployment rate rises, rents will also fall accordingly.

From this point of view, people who are worried that their wages will not rise enough for rent and are unwilling to rent a house for a long time may be unfounded. Most people can always afford to rent a house as long as they work hard. But looking at it from another perspective, if your salary does not rise as fast as your rent, does it also mean that your relative competitiveness in this city is declining?

In that case, you might as well find a place with less competitive pressure. Living in second- and third-tier cities - moving trees will kill people, but people will live!

Seeing this, you may be smart enough to realize: It turns out that only rent is linked to income, and housing prices are not very linked to income. !This is also why the rent-to-sale ratio of houses in first-tier cities has always been very low, only 1.5%~2%, barely beating the one-year fixed deposit interest rate.

After clarifying the above issues, we can add another variable to this topic: If I don’t buy a house but rent a house, can I invest my funds elsewhere and achieve better investment returns in one year? There shouldn’t be any problems with my rent, right?

According to an annualized rate of return of about 9%, doubling the principal in eight years is so easy!

If you buy a house, Beijing Can China's property market double in eight years? The bubble is a bit big. Money diggers don't dare to draw conclusions. It all depends on which end you bet on.

In addition to arithmetic problems, people who plan to rent a house for a long time generally worry about a quality of life issue.

Wacaijun feels that this issue should be viewed from two sides. We do not engage in class discrimination, but the fact is: the lower the rent, the easier it is for you to meet the best landlords; if the rent reaches five digits, The probability of encountering a top-notch landlord is extremely low.

The reason is very simple. A landlord who can collect tens of thousands of yuan a month is middle-class after all. He will have to pay you for the rent, and the time cost is not worth it. Therefore, if you are like the former colleague of Di Caijun and are willing to pay more than 10,000 yuan per month for rent in Beijing, I believe the quality of life is still very good.

And you have to consider that in the rental market, the law of bad money driving out good money also exists. Since Chinese people are generally reluctant to rent high-priced houses, the higher the rent, the more biased the buyer's market, and the stronger the tenant's bargaining power. If you are willing to rent for a long time, you can even negotiate a lower price.

The national conditions are different. After all, we cannot be like Germany, where 40% of people buy a house and 60% rent a house. And no matter how low the rent is, the landlord and the house can be constrained by the relevant regulations of the rental market. You can live a carefree life with a monthly rent (by the way, the German rent/per capita wage ratio is not as high as 1/3, it is about 1/5).

The only drawback of renting a house for a lifetime is probably the education of your children. The money you save by not buying a house is not enough for your children to go to an international school. You have to receive compulsory education within the system, and you will run into a lot of trouble if you don’t have a house...

So, unless you are a DINK or swear by For example, if you don’t marry someone who doesn’t want to get rich, you can’t get around the educational issues of long-term renting (of course there are ways, but they are not applicable to most people, so I won’t go into them here).

(The above answer was published on 2017-01-04, please refer to the actual relevant current home purchase policies)

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