A huge portion of the contemporary youth, especially those who work and live in big cities, often face a problem: to save money to buy a house or to rent a house and use the money saved for other investments to obtain stable benefits?
In China, buying a house is an extremely important activity in the lives of modern people. It is a typical financial management behavior that has both the attributes of life and investment.
From the perspective of the nature of life, shelter is one of the most basic needs. China’s founding father, Sun Zhongshan, included “home ownership” in people’s livelihood. Although China has become a modern country, the Chinese have long been a farming nation. He retained his ancestors’ thinking and living habits, thinking that only by owning his own real estate could he live and work in peace.
In terms of investment attributes, due to the soaring housing prices in recent years, the rate of return on real estate investment has surpassed those of most investment types, and the investment process does not seem to require much professional knowledge, which further promotes real estate to become the most important form of wealth for Chinese people.
However, compared with other types of investment products, the actual cost of real estate investment is actually very high. The amount of initial investment funds is large, the loan repayment time is long, the investment is huge, and the cost of cancellation is high. If you were looking for your first home, would you want to buy it? What type of home should you buy? How big should it be? Should you buy a brand-new house or a second-hand house? Would you choose to buy one in the old central city or an emerging city? All these are questions that must be deliberated on repeatedly to make decisions.
http://www.prres.net/Papers/Hargreaves_Rent_or_Buy_That_is_the_question.pdf page 5（2002）
https://www.zhihu.com/question/20689761/answer/1472167145 （2020）
https://www.zhihu.com/remix/albums/1246559242322296832/tracks/1246568912486711296/content?km_channel=search&origin_label=search （2020）
