The number that wasn’t the decision
I’m a buyers agent, and I rentvest myself. I rent where I want to live and own property where the numbers make sense for the long term. It works, but it has a cost most people only see once they use it.
The short version: moving to a cheaper rent cost us more than it saved, and we did it anyway.
The renewal and the listing across the road
The renewal for the place I rent came in recently at $30 a week more than we were paying. Felt above market, so before accepting it or pushing back, we had a look at what else was out there at that price.
That’s when the coincidence landed. Across the road, same block, a four bedroom two bathroom had just come up, one more bedroom than our three bedroom, at the exact moment we were weighing up the renewal. Same layout, same size, same build year. Air con in the second bedroom too, which we don’t have. Listed at the rent we’re already paying, not the higher one.
If that listing hadn’t appeared right then, we’d have stayed. We weren’t planning on moving. We liked where we were and intended to renew.
We’re also planning on expanding the family in the next few years, and three bedrooms wasn’t going to cut it forever, not with me working from home and needing an office. This just meant the problem got solved years before we actually needed it solved, for no extra cost.
What moving actually cost
Easy to look at that and call it a no brainer. It wasn’t, once I ran the numbers.
$30 a week is $1,560 a year if we’d taken it rather than pushing back. Against that: bond clean, $1,000. Crossover rent paying both leases at once, roughly another week and a half to two weeks of rent. More than $2,000 gone, upfront, to avoid a $30 a week bump.