中文导读

租房等于钱打水漂，买房才是面向未来的理智投资？其实，传统观点中并没有充分考虑到利率、房产交易费用、房屋维护费、机会成本等因素，买房置业其实并没有那么划算。从长期来看，租房和买房置业的费用基本相当。

Owner-occupation is not always a better deal than renting

The question hardly seems worth asking. Is it a better deal to rent a house or to buy one? Buying a house is a wise investment for the future, the argument goes, whereas renting one amounts to little more than throwing money down the drain. A closer look at the economics, however, shows that this view may be mistaken.

For one thing, renters often devote a smaller share of their income to rent than owner-occupiers devote to repayments of mortgage interest (in both cases, this is money handed over to someone else and never seen again). Whether one is cheaper than the other depends in part on interest rates. In the early 1990s, when interest rates were higher than they are today, the average ratio of mortgage-interest repayments to income was higher than the rent-to-income ratio in many countries.

That calculation nonetheless underestimates the cost of owner-occupation. Whether a home-owner is paying off a mortgage or not, they face a number of costs that renters do not, points out Ian Mulheirn of the Tony Blair Institute, a thinktank. For instance, a residential-property transaction in an OECD country incurs a median bill of about 8% of the value of the house (transaction costs for renting tend to be trivial).

Owner-occupiers must also account for wear and tear. Each year in America they pay around $200bn in maintenance and improvement costs (about 1% of the value of the houses in their possession). Home ownership also carries opportunity costs. In recent decades housing has proven to be a good investment; that may well continue. But capital locked up in a house could have made an even higher return if invested elsewhere.

What happens when you factor all this in? Take the example of the British housing market. In the run-up to the financial crisis of 2008-10, rapid increases in house prices and rising interest rates meant the user cost of owning actually rose well above rents. But over the long run the two tenures have cost about as much as each other. This is as economic theory would predict. Renting a home, and buying the right not to have to rent a home, are economically equivalent actions.

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Jan 16th 2020 | Special report | 364 words

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每日一学

2020/01/22

第一段第三句话中“...renting one amounts to little more thanthrowing money down the drain” 中的 amount to 是“总计”的意思吗？

其实动词短语 amount to sth 除了常见的“总计；共计”之意，还有“等于；相当于(to be equal to or the same as sth)”的意思，e.g. Her answer amounted to a complete refusal. 她的答复等于完全拒绝。固定搭配down the drain: if time, effort, or money goes down the drain, it is wasted or produces no results 〔时间、努力或金钱〕白白浪费掉 e.g. Well that's it. 18 months' work down the drain. 得了，就这么回事了，18 个月来的工作就白干了。原文这句话就可以理解为：这种观点认为，买房是对未来的明智投资，而租房无异于浪费钱。

（点击下方阅读训练营查阅更多讲解，词汇量需过八千方可报名，词汇量低于八千请移步☞词汇训练营）

声明：

本文全文摘选自The Economist(11th Jan 2020)，仅供个人学习交流使用，欢迎转发至朋友圈。添加主编微信englishmags2018获取打印版网盘链接。

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