1/ The Wealthy Renter: How to Choose Housing That Will Make You Rich (Alex Avery)
"As the biggest expense of our lives, how well we manage the cost of our housing has a greater impact on our cost of living than any other factor." (p. 7)
2/ "Our housing choices determine how long it takes to get to work, how much time we spend with friends and family, where our kids will go to school, how well we do our jobs, how much money we have for other things (travel, cars, clothes, jewellery, electronics, & collectibles).
3/ "It’s the biggest factor in when/how we retire.
"We’re conditioned to want beautiful places to live. Homeownership is aggressively marketed. Pro–home ownership policy is so pervasive that it has become part of the fabric of our society. It’s enmeshed in our belief system.
4/ "These beliefs revolve around personal freedom being best demonstrated through owning our own homes.
"I’ll debunk myths about renting and discuss strategies for making a renting lifestyle create the kind of security and wealth so often associated with home ownership." (p. 13)
5/ "By most metrics, Canadian housing is now very expensive.
"Unwavering commitment regardless of valuations is characteristic of cult-like behavior and groupthink. Support for home ownership seems so absolute that no evidence to the contrary could change people's minds." (p.16)
6/ "The attractive features of renting are rarely discussed.
"Renting can be a great financial decision, provide enormous lifestyle advantages, and allow you to avoid the financial leverage & anxiety associated with huge mortgages." (p. 19)
"There’s an unbelievable number of things that break, & it’s difficult to know when." (p. 25)
Owning involves both volatility and tail risk.
10/ "When you choose to be a renter, you’re improving your odds of finding better pay and career prospects. You can cast a wider net in your job hunt, considering more jobs in more places. It’s faster and easier for you to move for work, and the cost of moving is much lower.
11/ "Labor mobility is particularly important early in a career, when you’re trying to establish yourself and haven’t narrowed down the focus of your career. Finding the right job early on can radically change your path and provide exciting and interesting work." (p. 25)
12/ "Defaulting on a mortgage can mean huge costs. You could lose your entire down payment to things like transaction costs on the sale and legal bills, or, even worse, you could end up in bankruptcy.
"When you rent, you leave all of those worries to the landlord." (p. 27)
13/ "A rule of thumb is that maintenance and upgrades cost 2% to 5% percent of the value of a home each year.
"Even a condo corporation might underestimate the costs of maintenance and end up raising condo fees or making a special assessment to make up for deferred maintenance.
14/ "Landlords often undercharge on rent because they expect to make up the shortfall when the property goes up in value (which doesn’t always happen)." (p. 34)
A typical California house has a zero or negative cap rate as of June 2021:
16/ "What you would do with the money saved by selling your house and moving to less expensive housing?
"$1,000/month = four $3,000 vacations a year
"Whether the money is used for housing, cars, recreational classes, or sporting events, it's all consumption." (p. 40)
17/ "It’s hard to come to any other conclusion than that housing in Canada is quite expensive.
"The 70% of Canadians who own their homes have huge portions of their wealth tied up in expensive assets that might deliver only modestly positive returns or even negative returns.
18/ "If you assume Canadians are buying houses based on how much monthly payment they can afford, the decline in interest rates could account for 72.5% higher house prices since 2000 compared to the actual ~200% increase in the average Canadian house price since then." (p. 49)
19/ "Lower interest rates put upward pressure on house prices, but not on rents. The exceptionally low interest rates currently available in Canada have undoubtedly driven house prices higher, but they have not driven rents higher." (p. 70)
20/ "The difficult-to-measure role of foreign and speculative investors is concentrated in the ownership side. While speculative investing can drive up both prices & rents, the downside risk of a collapse is only a problem for homeowners (especially ones with mortgages)." (p. 74)
21/ "In a land-constrained market, single-family and low-rise prices can rise faster than incomes.
"With a fixed supply of land and a growing population, the portion of the population that owns the fixed number of low-density homes falls as a percentage of the total population.
22/ "Sometimes referred to as the exclusion effect, what happens is that the average incomes and wealth of the buyers of those homes rises, even if overall incomes and wealth aren’t rising." (p. 79)
23/ "Though Canadian house prices are high, renting has remained affordable, & some cities are more affordable than others for both renting & owning.
"The land constraint imposed by the Toronto greenbelt suggests most new housing supply will be high-rise in the future." (p. 83)
24/ "With Toronto price/income at 8.5x and price/rent at 40x, buying a home for the first time requires a huge proportion of income toward housing costs. This commitment involves elevated risks, including the potential for house prices to decline and interest rates to rise.
25/ "A forced sale results in very expensive transaction costs. Renting remains attractive, freeing up income for other investments and lifestyle expenses." (p. 93)
Your forced (and discounted) sale is what makes a professional real estate investor rich:
26/ The median price/rent ratio across five large Canadian cities is 33x.
In comparison, a typical suburban California gross rental yield is 3.6%, for price/rent of 28x and a resultant zero or negative cap rate (using local California expense numbers).
27/ If we use the author's rule of thumb, a Vancouver homeowner is paying more than the equivalent rent in maintenance and upgrades alone (without even considering property taxes, interest, or transaction costs).
28/ "Renting in Calgary provides flexibility to adapt to changing economic conditions. In the wake of the recent declines in energy sector investment and employment and with house prices remaining largely unchanged, renting is the more favorable option in Calgary today." (p. 115)
29/ "Homeowners may pay 1% above what a landlord does in maintenance/costs, which also accounts for time homeowners spend on maintenance." (p. 137)
This is roughly correct: repairs+capex≈1.75% in the U.S.; 2.75% is in the author's "rule of thumb" range.
30/ "After costs, the S&P/TSX Composite Index drops from 8.3% to 8% CAGR. By comparison, Canadian housing dropped from 4.6% to 3.7% CAGR. The additional amounts of money invested into kitchen & bathroom renovations come on top of the normal maintenance costs we deducted earlier.
31/ "Consider what investment returns would be if house prices had actually gone down, like they did a decade ago in the United States." (p. 140)
IMO, the 'right' way to do this uses expected Sharpe ratios and properly marked volatility:
32/ "The benefit from avoiding capital gains taxes is more than offset by the 10% total transaction costs [considering the house sold and the one bought].
"The more times a homeowner moves, the worse the post-cost return becomes." (p. 141)
33/ "The last major crash in Canadian housing happened in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Even for Canadians who were homeowners back then, the memories, emotions, & thought processes that accompany a housing crash have long since been replaced by year after year of price gains.
34/ "That is exactly the time when the risk of an overheated housing market rises — when it’s been so long since prices dropped sharply that people have nearly forgotten prices can fall.
When house prices do fall, the casualties are high: ask any American who bought in 2006.
35/ "Homes are typically bought with leverage, and the cycles are long. If house prices go down, they can go down and stay down for years. And, of course, homes are typically a homeowner’s largest asset." (p. 143)
36/ "The past 25 years, the time frame I analyzed in this chapter, is interesting specifically because it has been such an incredible period for Canadian house prices.
"Despite these favorable conditions, homes have underperformed Canada’s largest stocks." (p. 143)
37/ "Making leverage available increases people’s ability (and willingness) to pay higher prices for houses.
"House prices were lower before mortgages were available and are lower in countries where mortgages aren’t available." (p. 136)
38/ "Ironically, one of the effects of mortgage markets and pro–home ownership policies, both developed to improve access to housing, is to inflate the price of housing." (p. 153)
39/ "The worst time to use leverage is when prices are very high and when everyone else is using leverage too. That’s because when other potential buyers have borrowed as much as possible, they can’t buy any more. If prices fall, the losses are amplified." (p. 153)
40/ "The lack of ability to short-sell houses creates an imbalanced market for house prices and tends to lead to bubble-like markets.
"The prospect of making a concentrated, leveraged investment in a single asset would make most people run away in fear.
41/ "Try suggesting that a friend take all of the money he has, then borrow 10x as much and invest it all in a single stock. Yet, for housing, it’s so socially acceptable that people don’t bat an eye." (p. 159)
42/ "Housing fails to offer the convenient and appealing features of stocks and bonds. Any other investment with these characteristics would have to offer extraordinary return prospects for an investor to even look twice." (p. 161)
43/ The optimal vol target is equal to your Sharpe (if IID & foresight).
So if a house's expected Sharpe is 0.03, it should be leveraged to 3% volatility. Even a free-and-clear house may be too risky and should be a small part of a diversified portfolio.
44/ "Most things we buy are so well marketed that they aren’t just a car or a fridge or a watch. They’ve become extensions of our identity.
"It’s almost impossible to remain immune to the psychology of materialism and the idea of “keeping up with the Joneses.”
45/ "Contrast modern housing features with the necessities we require from housing, like a six-burner Wolf range costing 20 times the most basic electric stove available. It’s easy to lose track of the difference between our housing needs and our desires." (p. 163)
46/ "I’ve met people who are particularly enlightened about housing. They generally work in the real estate industry and are renters by choice. The thing that makes them so unique is that, as renters, they chose to pay for renovations to the rented homes they live in.
47/ "They made an agreement that rents won’t change for a few years and that, if they leave in the next few years, the landlord will pay them a portion of the cost of the renovation.
"They are very wealthy. They could have bought homes with all cash but chose not to." (p. 168)
48/ "People convince themselves they’ve made good decisions in the face of evidence to the contrary. This manifests as cognitive dissonance, familiarity bias, anchoring, the law of small numbers, the endowment effect, status quo bias, mental accounting, and overconfidence.
49/ "When people advise you to buy a house, it makes them feel better:
"It affirms their own decision to buy a house. (We all want to be part of a group.) Recommending that you rent would be contrary to their own choices and perceived success in housing.
50/ "Buying a home is an okay savings program, but not a great one (more on this later). But for parents giving advice to their children, any savings program can be rationalized as better than no savings program.
51/ "A mortgage is assumed to 'make you grow up.' Your attendance at work may improve. You become part of a community." (p. 173)
After controlling for confounders, Bucchianeri finds no evidence for homeownership being associated with civic participation.
53/ However, she does find that pain derived from one's neighborhood decreases if people in a similar demographic group and income as the homeowner are also homeowners themselves.
So there may be a feeling of community from being with 'people like me.'
54/ "The starter-home pitch may relies on fear as a motivator: If you don’t get in now, you might not be able to afford to get in after prices go up.
"But with a starter-home strategy, the price of a house must rise by at least 10% [due to transaction costs] just to break even.
55/ "We’ve also assumed no sudden repair bills. History suggests that the likelihood of a home sold after just two years working out in favor of the buyer is extremely low. The math only gets worse if the house goes down in value." (p. 176)
If a house's expected after-costs Sharpe ratio is 0.03 (adjust using your local numbers), you might be able to get a better Sharpe somewhere else, especially if you can access a rebalancing premium in liquid investments.
57/ The rebalancing premium has historically provided a large benefit.
From 1947-2013, Sharpe ratios for stocks, bonds, & commodities were 0.48. 0.43, and 0.39. A diversified, inverse-volatility weighted portfolio had a Sharpe of 0.81 in the same period.
58/ Opportunity cost depends a lot on your willingness to build unconventional portfolios.
So you have to weigh for yourself whether owning a $500,000 house for its consumption benefits is worth $50,000/year or whatever you calculate based on your own expected opportunity cost.
59/ One proxy for a house's consumption benefits is to account for private school tuition (which would free you to live in a cheaper or more convenient area).
In expensive areas, the opportunity cost of owning may be much larger than tuition would be. (Run the numbers and see!)
60/ For low-income people, especially without access to low mortgage rates, money saved from renting can used to live in a neighborhood with better public schools.
In nicer neighborhoods, renting tends to be cheaper than owning due to lower cap rates:
61/ Locally-zoned schools do make it difficult for some families to get out of poverty. (This is no longer about renting vs. owning: cap rates are lower in better areas.)
Joel Greenblatt has suggested vouchers and started charter schools to address this:
62/ "The real estate agent who helps you buy a starter home always wins — from day one! She will most likely get paid twice: once to buy and once to sell that starter home.
"But the use of fear as a selling tool is common across many other sales professions as well." (p. 176)
63/ "For an agent, a house flipper is a dream client, especially one who buys/sells several homes/year." (p.178)
For an investor who buys at discounts of (30%+repairs), the relationship can be beneficial. It's the 30% discount that makes flips profitable.
64/ "The vast majority of the population can afford to arrange (by buying or renting) clean and safe housing. When governments pursue pro–home ownership housing policy on the basis that a clean and safe residence is good for one’s health, they are stretching the truth." (p. 187)
65/ After meeting the basic need for shelter, Bucchianeri finds that homeownership is not associated with better health.
After controlling for confounders, owners weigh more & are less satisfied with their health (though we can't be sure this is causal).
66/ "In Canada, homeowners generally can’t afford to be unemployed or choose jobs that don’t pay well/have unreliable income.
"Some of us are lucky enough to get paid well to do work we love. But even in those lucky cases, the effect of a mortgage on your career can be dramatic.
67/ "If payments are 32% of your income, you can only take new jobs that pay the same amount as what you make now.
"You could be downsized or your industry could fall on bad times. Even governments have budget cuts and layoffs." (p. 200)
68/ "Buying a house is a big commitment — both to a mortgage and to continue to make a high income for a long time. Losing the option to leave can affect how much you enjoy your job.
"The day you know you can walk away from is the day you look at work through a whole new lens.
69/ "It fundamentally changes the way you act. You won’t have to consider whether your actions might put your job at risk. If you disagree with something, you can speak up. If you are freer to speak you mind and have good ideas, you’re likely to be better at your job.
70/ "The more you need your income, the more limited your options are. Other opportunities may not be as financially rewarding but may offer career advancement or more rewarding work.
"Renting is better for your career than owning." (p.200)
71/ "Due to better returns, those who invest in the stock market can contribute less of their income to achieve the same effect as is necessary for those who invest in home ownership. In both cases, the discipline of making regular payments into a savings program is critical.
72/ "The discipline is not a result of the asset purchased but rather the financing structure used by most homebuyers. The forced savings element (rather than superior investment performance) is what gives home ownership the fabulous reputation as a wealth builder." (p. 208)
73/ "Renters always know exactly how much they are paying for housing. If it’s too much, they’ll notice, and because it’s inexpensive for renters to move, they often move to housing that fits their needs. Homeowners, however, find it much harder to reduce housing expenses.
74/ "Taking on roommates is an option, but that is an uncomfortable prospect for many retirees. Other than sharing the cost of the home with someone else, the only way to reduce the cost of ownership in a significant way is sell the home." (p. 221)
75/ "It’s impossible to predict the future with 100% certainty. Regulatory changes, technological disruption, natural disasters, demographic shifts, monetary policy, currency fluctuations, trade policies, and tax rates changes can affect the price of investments, including homes.
76/ "House prices do go down. Markets across Canada have seen declines in recent years, despite the majority of them seeing increases.
"Renting makes it easier to see housing costs clearly. It might also increase your net income, freeing you up to explore new interests." (p.222)
77/ "A roof, HVAC system, or foundation can be $10,000+. Murphy’s Law says major expenses arise at the worst time: the same month tuition is due, a wedding has to be paid for, or expensive medical treatment is required. Huge, unexpected expenses are a part of life for homeowners.
78/ "Despite the many advantages to renting, it costs less each month to rent than it does to buy in Canadian cities.
"The mortgage payment alone (ignore property taxes, maintenance, and other costs) is at least 70% more than renting a two-bedroom apartment across Canada.
79/ "A good investment is one without personal bias or emotions. The decision is based purely on expected return prospects.
"A house may provide a good return. History suggests most don’t. But the real problem is that we confuse it with investment and end up spending too much.
80/ "Partly because renting is cheaper, you can afford to live in a better location when you rent.
"Less time spent on commuting and shopping means more time with family and friends, relaxing or doing whatever you like to do with your free time." (p. 232)
81/ "A misunderstood, heavily marketed, wildly popular investment that making 38% of average Canadians’ wealth (much more than that for mortgage holders) is a recipe for disappointment.
"Appreciation over the past 20 years in Canada sets unrealistic expectations for the future.
82/ "If prices rise over the next ten years at the same 5.9%/year rate as the last ten years, and for the next ten years Canadian household incomes rise at the same 2.9% as the last ten years, average price-to-income ratio will reach 9.3 times." (p. 235)
"The Hamptons effect: Contrarian play was advantageous. I insisted on paying for everything—drinks, dinners, tolls, gas. That made me a coveted guest, allowing me to go wherever I wanted, whenever I wanted."
3/ "Value, momentum & defensive/quality applied to US individual stocks has a t-stat of 10.8. Data mining would take nearly a trillion random trials to find this.
"Applying those factors (+carry) across markets and asset classes gets a t-stat of >14."
2/ "The model's four terms describe different life stages for an individual who marries during the sample period. The intercept reflects the average life satisfaction of individuals in the baseline period [all noncohabiting years that are at least one year before marriage]."
3/ " 'How satisfied are you with your life, all things considered?' Responses are ranked on a scale from 0 (completely dissatisfied) to 10 (completely satisfied).
"We center life satisfaction scores around the annual mean of each population subsample in the original population."
1/ Short-sightedness, rates moves and a potential boost for value (Hanauer, Baltussen, Blitz, Schneider)
…
* Value spread remains wide
* Relationship between value and rates is not structural
* Extrapolative growth forecasts drive the value premium
… robeco.com/en-int/insight…
2/ "The valuation gap between cheap and expensive stocks remains extremely wide. This signals the potential for attractive returns going forward."
3/ "We observe a robust negative relationship between value returns and changes in the value spread.
"The intercept of ≈10% can be interpreted as a cleaner estimate of the value premium, given that it is purged of the time-varying effects of multiple expansions & compressions."
2/ Part 1: Basic directional strategies
Part 2: Adjusted trend, trend and carry in different risk regimes, spot trend, seasonally-adjusted carry, normalized trend, asset class trend
Part 3: Breakouts, value, acceleration, skew
Part 4: Fast mean reversion
Part 5: Relative value
3/ Related reading
Time-Series Momentum
Two Centuries of Trend Following
https://t.co/R6JQb6Cg96
Carry
https://t.co/poFk6OWQsO
Value and Momentum Everywhere
https://t.co/l0wVgAOrhL
2/ "The broadly similar pattern of adverse health and well-being reported as new-onset at 6- and 12 months among test-positives and test-negatives highlights the non-specific nature of these symptoms and suggests that multiple aetiologies may be responsible."
3/ Related reading:
Efficacy of Vaccination on Symptoms of Patients With Long COVID