Lonestarz wrote: ↑Sun Feb 11, 2018 1:30 pm
I work downtown. Downtown proper is absolutely dead after about 6. Sure there are some nice restaurants and various happy hours but if you compare actual downtown to anywhere else between downtown and west beltway 8 you will see sparce it is. After about 7 pm, during weeknights 60% of the people I see out are homeless.
What you find are people who bought several years ago and will rent out for tax/fees plus a markup over their mortgage. You may be able to rent out a house for similar price to what it costs now to buy (still more than the owner paid) but if you plan on renting for another 5 years... you might be able to rent for similar to current purchase price but likely much more than the cost of you had purchased.
In 2 houses in Houston we experienced 34% and 22% appreciation in 7 and 5 years respectively. I don’t expect such huge appreciation unless you want to buy in gentrification neighborhoods but if we are talking about cost of rent vs own you can’t just look at current prices. Even rent vs own calculators have a projected rent/property value assumption.
Also the comment was specifically about Houston. Houston and Dallas probably have similar property tax rates and upper 2% is legit if you wantto live in a city. Texas is mostly rural so state wide averages mean nothing.
Actually, Lonestarz, the OP said “Texas” and “large Texas cities”. He used Houston as an example, but it was clear to me he was not referring to just Houston.
The property tax rates vary significantly across the Dallas Fort Worth metro area. Those rates are closer to 2% rather than 3% for a number of suburbs close to where jobs are being created. And some of these lower tax suburbs are large, such as Lewisville-Flower Mound-Highland Village with 200,000 population, and Plano-Allen with 400,000 population. These are not by any stretch of the imagination considered rural areas.
One of the reasons why the big cities of Dallas and Fort Worth are losing big employers to the suburbs has to be the lower property tax rates for employees. This started decades ago when companies such as EDS, Dr Pepper, Frito Lay, JC Penney, and others chose the suburbs. Exxon Mobil and Kimberly Clark are not in low tax suburbs, but their employees can live in such nearby ones. The growth of suburban power continues today as Toyota North America and the Amazon fullfillment center rejected the bigger cities.
Property taxes matter, and large metro areas like Dallas are anything but uniform in that respect.