# Rent? Or Buy?



## Longford (May 25, 2012)

The decision many in-bound expats are confronted with when coming to Mexico is, "Do we rent, or should we buy our own place?" We see such questions/comments here on the Expat Mexico forum and on other Mexico-specific web forums. Seasoned Mexicophiles almost unanimously advise a newbie to wait at least a year before considering a buy. Yet, some expats dive-in at the start ... buying their own place. 

I follow many blogs maintained by expats in Mexico, and others which are Mexico-specific. One of blogs I follow is that of an expat who moved to the Lakeside communities about 3 years ago. I remember when the couple started posting questions before their move, and have followed the experiences they've shared since living in Mexico full-time.

A current posting in the blog discusses the Rent vs. Buy question and provides some insight into the decision by the couple, after 3 years as renters, to purchase their own home. Their comments shed some light on the reasoning behind the recommendations to rent at first.

Here's a link to the blog, and the comments:

Our Adventure in Chapala


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## AlanMexicali (Jun 1, 2011)

No one every mentions that in most places here if you decide to sell a home it takes a long time.

My friend from SD bought a house in TJ at the end of 2008 when prices were rock bottom. It was listed for $130.000 US and he paid $65,000 US. A very nice place and quiet street close to downtown.

His brother lost his job in LA that year and sold his house there and bought a very nice 3 bedroom house also for $65,000 US in a very close to downtown área on a bus route. It is a nice área but mixed. Right across the street was a bar. They had live Banda music Fri. and Sat. until 2AM. [very loud and at times very bad]. The good thing is the bar closed a couple of years later and is a bakery now.


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## lagoloo (Apr 12, 2011)

Having a bar across the street can change your whole life.
A man I know bought a very fine house at the peak of the market in 2007 with a restaurant across the street and a few doors down. Restaurant; no problem. Then the place started having live, loud music.
It had been there long before he arrived and nothing has been done about it. Oh, unhappy day to be a home owner in a down market with a problem place across the street.

Rent. And check out the neighborhood potential carefully before even thinking about buying.


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## sparks (Jun 17, 2007)

Longford said:


> A current posting in the blog discusses the Rent vs. Buy question and provides some insight into the decision by the couple, after 3 years as renters, to purchase their own home.


Renting for 3 years is plenty of time to figure out if you want to live in an area or even Mexico at all. Don't rush into buying for any reason.

I bought a lot after 3 years and the adjoining lot after the 4th year. Construction started a few months later. No regrets and I can let it go cheap if I need to


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## Hound Dog (Jan 18, 2009)

Interesting onservations on renting versus buying. I enjoyed the blog comments posted by Longford and the comment by Alan above. The blogger was writing of renting/buying in the Lakeside (Chapala) área and Alan lives in San Luis Potosí but writes of experiences of others in Tijuana. I thought that those prospective expats thinking of moving to someplace in Mexico and contemplating the alternatives of renting versus buying might benefit from our experience over the past 13 years of living in very disparate parts of this country.

When we moved here in 2001, we planned to look into moving to several places scattered about the country we had speculated might be nice places in which to reside in retirement. We had selected just a few places to look at includiing Guadalajara, Lake Chapala, Oaxaca City, Cuernavaca, Xalapa and, because it is an appealing city culturally although located in the Yucatán flatlands at beach level and thus a bit hot and humid for us, Mérida. 

Well, my wife flew down on an exploratory trip with the intention of checking out all these places starting with the Guadalajara área since that was the best flight from our then home town of San Francisco. While looking around the "Lakeside" área of Lake Chapala in the municipality of Chapala, she found a home with which she immediately fell in love, bought the place on the spot and that was that. Auspicious beginnings do not always presage follow-through but, what the hell, I also loved the place upon flying down to Lakeside and still do after 13 years so, sometimes, decisions made in haste work out well in the long run. In those days, the Lakeside real estate market was active and hot, at least in the Ajijic área so one bought (or rented) expeditiously upon finding a desirable residence or the residence was gone and the opportunity lost. The blogger´s residential search took place three years ago when the Lakeside market was quite soft and decisions could be contemplated over time since homes for sell or rent were languishing on the market for, often, significant periods of time and some serious bargaining opportunities existed for both potential buyers and renters. So, I urge the reader to try to gauge the market correctly at the time he/she is seeking to acquire a residence and then contemplate whether at that point in time in that market, renting or buying is the most advisable alternative. 

As to gauging markets and deciding whether to rent or buy, the person seeking a residence must understand that various urban housing markets vary greatly in cost and availabilty of housing. In 2005, having become a bit bored with year-round living at Lake Chapala despite its marvelous climate and natural beauty, we decided to re-think some other areas of Mexico, mainly Oaxaca City and Mérida, as places to establish residence. However, we had some rules relating to the old saw, "Location, Location, Location". If we were going to live in an old colonial city, we were only interested in living in or very near the historic center - not in suburbia or exurbia. Oaxaca turned out to be a poor place to reside in its beautiful historic center due to the unavailability of buying opportunities at any reasonable cost as families living within the confines in that center are reluctant to be the generation that sell off its "patrimony". We found buying opportunities in Mérida within the historic center but the unbearably hot and humid climate was too much for us after 40 years of living in cool San Francisco and Lake Chapala so we got the hell out of there.

As we drove, sort of indirectly, back toward Lake Chapala, we took a detour to San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas, a city of about 130,000 souls which had not been on our list of cities in which to consider moving and were almost immediately taken with its colonial charm and bracing mountain air at 2,000 meters to say nothing of the incredible beauty of the surrounding Chiapas Highlands ascending to even much greater heights with spectacularly mountain vistas inhabited by indigenous Maya. We decided that we had to live in that place but how do you find a suitable home in the colonial center in a town surrounded by destitute hillside "favelas" and lots of not-particularly-attractive barrios? Well, the answer is you pound the pavement in áreas you find desirable until you spot a "Se Vende" sign and, mind you, this is the only practical method of finding a prospective property in a city such as San Cristóbal and most regional urban áreas in Mexico outside of the more prominent urban áreas attracting large crowds of foreign tourists or expats seeking housing. There are virtually no real estate brokerage firms in towns such as San Cristóbal and those that you may run across have no significant inventories of properties for sale and must be regarded with skepticism since real estate bróker "middlemen" are not generally highly regarded by potential local sellers.

So, we hit the pavement in our chosen barrios in the historic center looking for buying alternatives - not renting alternatives - as we knew intuitively that we would only be finding buying alternatives in homes requiring extensive refurbishment and, sure enough, that is what we finally found after days of walking the streets in our selected área in what is know as the El Cerrillo Barrio - a fine neighborhood adjacent to the city´s huge indigenous market  and within easy walking distance of the historic plaza. A great location but a home (ruin, actually) requiring a total rebuild from the foundation up. One can´t rent and do this - one must buy so any renting alternative was not even remotely in the cards. 

Both renting and buying have potentially positive and negative outcomes. For instance, we had thought to sell the Lakeside property once we had completed the renovation of the San Cristóbal property but during the interim, before we placed the lakeside home on the market, two things happpened:
* The lakeside market turned south on us and, there for a time, selling a residence at Lakeside became quite problematic. Houses were not moving except at deep discounts and even then at a snail´s pace.
* We discovered that we had become first acquainted with San Cristóbal when the crystal clear mountain air charmed us and, as we later discovered, during the summer rainy season the Chiapas Highlands had some climatological issues. otherwise known as cold, damp days subject to serious and dangerous daily inundations inducing mudslides endangering whole villages, washing out vital highways and killing and maiming countless people in rural mountain áreas. This, as it turns out, was no place to live in the summer so the peaceful shores of Lake Chapala became more and more enticing as those inundations swept upon us. So, we kept the Lakeside house as, after all, we owned it outright with no debt and miniscule property taxes so why dispose of our escape from Noah´s Ark on the Pacific? 

Words of wisdom from Alan. It may not be easy to resell but, on the other hand, if you buy you have a paid-for roof over your head with no debt and minimal taxes with no landlord staring down your back and, thus, you can live on beans if things go sour financially and there is no landlord with his/her hand out every month demanding money you no longer have. 

To each his own


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## makaloco (Mar 26, 2009)

Hound Dog said:


> It may not be easy to resell but, on the other hand, if you buy you have a paid-for roof over your head with no debt and minimal taxes with no landlord staring down your back and, thus, you can live on beans if things go sour financially and there is no landlord with his/her hand out every month demanding money you no longer have.


That's exactly how I was thinking: get housing taken care of, and I can make up the rest as I go along. Traveling around to check out different locations and renting at first is probably sound advice for most people, if they can afford it. I had very limited funds and bought my house during my second visit to La Paz. Extensive travel or a long-term rental wouldn't have left me with enough to buy. Based on what I know now, seven years later, if I were in that same situation again I'd do the exact same thing.


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## sparks (Jun 17, 2007)

makaloco said:


> Extensive travel or a long-term rental wouldn't have left me with enough to buy. Based on what I know now, seven years later, if I were in that same situation again I'd do the exact same thing.


Now you just have to get around to 'stuccoing' those brink walls and putting a real roof over you ..... opcorn: :tape:


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## makaloco (Mar 26, 2009)

Done! :-D


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## sparks (Jun 17, 2007)

Perfecto ..... just the way they did mine but with many more posts to support. Original was at a slant and I think they were thinking a "lamina" roof. I wanted a second story some day so a lamina roof was not going to work


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