Day 49: does a €694,600 purchase make sense with a five-to-seven-year horizon?

H

HandyHarbor

Buyer
Established
I’m 49 days into comparing a coastal-home purchase with continuing to rent. A comparable Paris apartment is around €694,600, but mortgage payments, tax, maintenance and association dues would all push my ownership costs well above my current rent. Equity is the main attraction, yet I may move within five to seven years. How would you weigh that against buying and selling costs, rising building fees, insurance exposure and resale liquidity? Disagreement welcome, provided you explain the assumption behind it.
 
With that time horizon, I would lean toward renting unless the purchase still works under fairly conservative resale assumptions. Equity is not the whole mortgage payment, and transaction costs can consume much of the benefit over five years. What are the annual association dues, and does the shared building have adequate reserves? Those two details could change the answer substantially.
 
I’m not convinced renting automatically wins. If the mortgage principal paid down is meaningful and comparable rents rise, ownership could still come out ahead by year seven. The caveat is the coastal-home element: maintenance intensity, energy use and insurance exposure may be less predictable than for the Paris apartment used as the comparison. Tenant demand also matters only if you would realistically rent it out after moving.
 
I’d run separate five-year and seven-year scenarios rather than one average. Include principal repayment, purchase and eventual sale costs, association-fee increases, planned building work, insurance, maintenance and a vacancy allowance if letting is possible. Then stress-test a slow resale with no price growth. If buying only wins when appreciation is assumed, the flexibility of renting is probably doing more work than it first appears.
 
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