[colgin]

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colgin,

What you wrote is virtually identical to what friends of mine in NYC who have recently (well, mainly six to nine months ago) sold their places told me. None of them have any regrets about their decision.

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If you view buying/selling a place purely as an economic decision, I think the risk of doing what your friends did is extremely low. (Yeah, prices could shoot up again, but barring serious inflation this is really unlikely; more likely you can always rebuy the same place for less.)

There might be other reasons not to sell, like your eally love your place. The other issue is that in NYC, even if you are willing to spend a good amount on rent, the housing stock is just not that good (as Paluka stated), particularly as more and more rental buildings convert to condos. There have been some nice rental developments in NYC that were built in the last 5 years or so, but while they all have nice amenities, the apartments tned to be small. But you know what, the apartments most people can afford to buy here are really small too at $1,000 +/- per sq. ft.

We are lucky in that we are in one of the nicer village full service buildings that went condo years ago and the owner of my unit rents it out as an investment property. Right now we spend $3,000/month, which is actually under market rates for this unit. However, to buy the unit would cost me about $850K give or take. So, I would have to putdown $190K (including closign costs), and my gross monthlies would be a litle over $6,000 (incl. maintenance). I would epxect ot get back about $1,800 in tax savings but would forgo about $900 a month (before taxes) in risk free investment income (short term T bills).

Thus, unless you think there is going to be continued appreciation, renting seems like the better deal when compared to buying equivalent properties. Part of the problem in NY is that there are not thos eequivalent proerties in that much of the rental stock just sucks. Elsewhere in the U.S. I understand this is not a problem. I am not sure why people in California or Florida bubble areas are buying now where you can rent a nice house for far less than it costs to buy. That is just crazy!