Craigslist.com is a tool almost everyone is familiar with, but most people don’t associate it with their home buying search. While Craigslist does have numerous listings of homes for sale in its “real estate for sale” section, we believe the site’s rental data is more valuable for the diligent home buyer.

An informed home purchase must take into consideration how much renting a similar property would cost. Especially in the past few years, renting has been a great way to save money and avoid exposure to a declining real estate market. In most metropolitan markets, Criagslist is the most comprehensive location for rental market data.

Anyone who has used Criagslist can attest to its utter simplicity. Searches are easy and can be filtered by not only price, bedroom/bathroom counts, key words and photos, but by individual neighborhoods.

For the foreseeable future, the monthly cost of owning vs. renting will become increasingly similar. In some areas, its already cheaper to own. Armed with accurate rental data, you can confidently examine different personal budget scenarios and determine whether renting or buying makes more sense for you.

But beyond just understanding the difference between the costs of renting and buying in a certain town, it may make sense to “move up” into a better school district by renting, rather than buying. Likewise, if a certain neighborhood is out of your price range to buy but offers a great commute — why not consider renting?

There is, of course, a bit of a social stigma associated with renting rather than owning, not to mention the satisfaction of owning a home and creating a life for you and your family inside. These intangibles may be difficult to quantify, but they are no less an important part of the rent vs. buy decision.

For each person, these factors may be “worth” different amounts, but until you look at the numbers its impossible to say, “Owning a home is worth $X per month to me. Looks like we’ll be renting for a bit longer.” Or, “Let’s take the plunge!”

Tags: craigslist, home prices, own, rent

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 1st, 2009 at 1:00 am and is filed under Cirios Trends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.