Is renting everything a new way to be cool?
Also, if you rent apartments for 10 years you can spend 10 years moving around to follow opportunities. If you pay a mortgage for 10 years, you can look forward to spending the next 20 paying the same mortgage, and unless you want to pay for housing twice, living in the same place. Standard mortgages are 30 years! That's maybe half of your adult life you have to spend paying interest. That's a level of commitment comparable to having a damn kid, except instead of a living and thinking person it's a material possession.
Plus, owning your own home, even if there's a mortgage outstanding, feels very different to renting. Certainly for the English, home-ownership is a cultural value.
For example, to get my mortgage down to the cost of a 1 bedroom rental I can only take out about a $90,000 loan. So, if I want a modestly nice $150,000 to $200,000 home I have to save up to put down $60,000 to $110,000 down payment. That's alot of money and to see it all disappear in a near instant is intimidating and scary. I'd rather stick that kind of money in some sort of investments and watch it grow.
Owning also can come with some undesirables to me such as the location is not as good as my apartment (unless I can up my purchase price of a home to $300,000+ or want a higher mortgage), the house is not that nice (not nice enough to want to live in forever and needs upfront fixing), if it needs maintenance (roof, A/C, lawn, etc) I have to pay for it.
However, what I have noticed is if you need at least a 2 bedroom and preferably 3 (family of 3 to 4 perhaps), at least where I live, a small down payment and mortgage is so worth it. Renting would be stupid. The rent for a 3 bedroom is usually more, even for a 5%-10% down payment.
I know a whole bunch of people who bought houses 10 years ago and, today, if they sold their homes, would have lost several times what I've paid in rent during that same period. If they can hold out until the market returns they'll be okay, if not, who knows.... but now they're stuck with them.
The key is to just put some clarity around what mortgaging, or even buying a home outright, really is - and why you are doing it.
If you are doing it because you WANT to own a home and you think it's a magic, foolproof investment - that's foolish. Those are two different things.
If you're doing it because you WANT to own that particular home and raise your family there for the next 30 years, then some day retire to a smaller apartment, or even stay there until it's time for the funny-farm, and you are doing it on terms you can afford over that time, that's fine - but your primary reason in this case is not as an investment. You will have expenses along the way that are more or less the same as renting. and while it seems unlikely over a 30 years span, it's always possible that the home won't be worth much in terms of equity 30 years later when you want to sell it. (the dollar value may have gone way up, but the cost of living will have risen as well. I'm not saying there will be no equity, but it may not be the best investment you could have made, and it could easily turn out to be a bad one)
If you are into the real-estate business for investment purposes, then you should be studying various real-estate markets and looking for the best opportunities to buy/fix/hold/sell strategically. THese are typically not the types of houses you want to live in.
Now, home prices have fallen a bit since that article was written, but you really need to examine all the costs that go into home ownership (including mortgage interest), and see if it really gives you a net positive. For a lot of people it may not.
Check out this cool calculator for some more details: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/business/buy-rent-calcula...
We buy plenty of things for non-ivestnemtn reasons - a house COULD be one of those things, depending on your situation.