“Suppose you buy a home for $500,000, financing the purchase with a mortgage at a 6.4 percent interest rate. A few years later, you sell for $600,000. Interest rates have fallen, and the new buyer is able to get a mortgage at 4.7 percent.
The price of the home has risen by 20 percent, so you could just say the cost of housing has gone up 20 percent. But that would be misleading. Assuming a 20 percent down payment, your original mortgage would have cost $2,502 per month, while the new owner’s mortgage would cost $2,489 per month. The monthly mortgage payment required to own the home actually went down.”<p>This calculation ignores the down payment, which would be $20,000 more for the buyer a few years later. Seems like a better comparison is to amortize the down payment somehow into the calculation, since buyers have to save up for the down payment while renting prior to their first home. Anyways, the full costs of purchase are not accounted for with this method.<p>Also, what about the other necessary costs of owning a home like closing costs, real estate commissions, insurance, property taxes, pest control, repairs, hoa fees, etc?