Forbes Super Six
Forget renting, it pays to buy a home in Houston
If you're looking for a place in Houston, you're better off buying(economically) than renting.
Houston is one of the six best places in the country to buy a home.
In Forbes magazine's breakdown of the best cities to rent and buy a home, Houston is named as one of six cities where it pays to buy rather than rent.
The magazine used its own housing data combined with stats from Zillow.com and Trulia.com to determine which cities offered renters, and which cities offered buyers, the better deal. The six cities in Forbes' "Six Best Cities to Buy a Home" represent places that all three sources agree on — Miami, Jacksonville, Phoenix, Atlanta, Nashville and Houston.
Forbes reports that Houston's price-to-rent ratio is nine to 15 times annual rent, meaning that buying a home in Houston means paying between nine and 15 times what you would pay to rent it for a year. In contrast, in a city like San Francisco, which was named one of the best cities to rent rather than buy, the price of purchasing a home is 20 to 30 times what it costs to rent.
The magazine says that in many cities, nervous buyers are crowding into the rental market, driving rent prices skyward. So if you live in Houston and were on the fence, please, take the plunge.
