Data shows it’s cheaper to buy a home than rent in Seattle

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.

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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 the first time on its annual list, Seattle is more expensive to live in than Washington DC.

HSH.com looked at 27 metro areas for it’s data. While there are 21 cities below Seattle ranging from Pittsburgh ($29,480.96) to Denver ($70,186.63). That leaves only five US cities more expensive than Seattle, from Boston ($79,577.57) to San Francisco ($144,196.08).

Renting

Now head on over to Smartasset.com where they dove into data to determine what a person needs to earn to be able to rent an apartment in America’s biggest cities.

The cities on the list should look familiar, and once again Seattle is sixth from the top. It would take a person earning $98,271 to rent comfortably in the Emerald City. That’s roughly $8,000 more than what HSH.com said a person needs to buy property with 10 percent down.

A Seattleite needs to earn $6,685 more in 2016 than in 2015 to rent an apartment, according to Smartasset.com.

Smartasset.com based its estimation off fair market rents for two bedroom apartments, and the typical assumption that a person should spend about 30 percent of what they make on rent.

And no surprise, San Francisco is the most expensive town to rent in across the entire United States, according to the list.

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