Rental Numbers

As Karla mentions today on the family blog, we are moving from our rented apartment to a rented house next month. This will, among other things, let me get back to barbecuing, a hobby I’ve been unable to indulge for the past 14 months of apartment living. Before opting for this particular rental, we looked at all our rental options, and it was an interesting exercise.

We started out looking in our current neighborhood. Typical rents for a single family house around here, according to our (extensive but unscientific) survey conducted via Internet/phone/driving by, come out at about a dollar a square foot per month. That seems high by national standards as well as for Austin (it is about what we paid living on South Temple, a block from the Temple in the heart of downtown Salt Lake City). It is also high by our budget standards, since our goal was to pay roughly the same amount in housing as we are now ($0.80 square foot or so).

So what goes into that dollar/sq ft/month? A landlord has to pay taxes and homeowners fees in addition to the mortgage. And taxes around here are significantly influenced by the school district. (This post is not about correlating school taxes with academic performance, an exercise I am completely unqualified to undertake; all I can do is look at the numbers, and the fact is that certain school districts levy higher property taxes than others.) School taxes and HOA are components of the first three rules of real estate (location, location, location) and they result in higher rents when compared to properties that are not maintained to HOA standards and/or properties in school districts with lower tax burdens.

In the end we compromised on the school district, since we won’t have any school-age children for several more years. We found a nice place in clean, safe neighborhood that rents well below a dollar/sq ft per month, larger than our current place but for less per square foot. As an added bonus, the new place is 10 miles closer to work than our current apartment, with the following cost savings in gas (these calculations were made with $4/gallon gas and our aging Nissan, which gets ~20 mpg average city+highway):

• 30 miles/day = 1.5 gallons = $6 per day, * 20 working days/month = $120 per month commuting cost at our current home
  

• 10 miles/day = 0.5 gallons = $2 per day, * 20 working days/month = $40 per month commuting cost at our new home

Pretty cool, huh? Although it wasn’t the goal, it appears this reduces our “carbon footprint” as well—although, now that I can barbecue again, I guess we’ll be offsetting the decreased oil consumption with increased use of charcoal and mesquite smoking chips. So sue me.