Is it worth to buy a house in Atlanta?
Short answer: yes
Given a 30 years timeframe in Atlanta it's better to buying . To understand why, let's take a look at some of the factors.
Warning: these numbers are averages across the whole Atlanta market. Individual cases can differ significantly so it's advised to make your own calculation.
The data
Price
- Avarage rent price in Atlanta is 1 728.00
- Avarage home price is 288 746.00.
Tax and maintenance
Currently the property tax in Atlanta is 0.94%. This means that every year you spend an extra 4 378.00 if you buy a house.
Further maintenance cost occurs when you own a house which add to the years cost as well. We tend to calculate with 1% of the value of the house / year. This usually gives a good enough estimate on long term.
Rent savings
Although renting won't build equity (ownership on the house) for you but many times you can save significant money which builds up quickly and using it properly can yield more over the years. Looking at Atlanta this would be roughly 15 906.22 in total.
Putting this all together
When we decide if renting or buying would be more beneficial there are two main numbers we need to consider.
Total equity owned
Simply put this is how much you own. In case of buying this would be the value of the house at the end of the mortgage period. In case of renting this is how much you saved up during the same time and how much it yielded if it was invested.
Non-recoverable cost
This is the harder concept but we can think of it as how much it costed us to build that ownership. Talking about buying, this would be the sum of mortgage interest, tax and maintenance. In renting scenario it's just the total of the monthly rent price over the hypothetical period.
Conclusion
If you can afford the downpayment it pays off to buy a house in Atlanta. You'll end up with a nicely appreciated value for less cost than if you had been renting throughout the years.
Do you want to learn more? We have the full calculations, graphs and more on the detailed calculation page.
