Hatta Misra <br> <small> /ˈhɑtɑ/ · they/them </small>

Energy markets nerd (professional), general purpose nerd (amateur)

Intro

In 2025, Ben Felix, a Canadian investment manager, made a series of YouTube videos (first and second) in which he modelled buying a place of residence in multiple Canadian cities and compared that to renting and investing the difference. Using historical data over twenty years, he showed that renters in his model ended with higher wealth than comparable homeowners in major Canadian cities including Toronto, Montreal, and Winnipeg (which, incidentally, is wonderful - the human rights museum is well worth a visit).

I wondered - what would the numbers look like for Australia? Though on the opposite sides of the world, Canada and Australia have similar housing markets. The Australian Dream of a quarter-acre suburban block with a front and back garden seem like a carbon copy of the Canadian (and for that matter American) Dream.

And in the past twenty years the (real and perceived) issues impacting the Canadian and Australian housing markets (and housing crises!) also seem similar. Landlords taking advantage of poor tenant protections and rental regulations. An array of issues being blamed for the spike in housing prices, from tax breaks for investment properties to rising construction costs and high rates of immigration. Increasing financial stress for both renters and mortgage payers.

Seeing how home prices have risen so greatly in their lifetime, and the social/cultural pressures favouring homeownership, it’s clear why many Australians think owning a house is both necessary and sufficient for building wealth. But are they right: is it a sucker’s game to rent the home you live in? To answer that question, I’ve adapted the model presented by Mr Felix in his videos (and further detailed in a 2025 paper he co-wrote with Hamza Bin Arif) to analyse wealth outcomes of renting versus owning a home in Australian cities over the past 20 years, starting from January 2006 and ending in December 2025.

Renters came out ahead in 3/4 of cases modelled

An alternative title for this section could be “The results will shock you (NOT CLICKBAIT)”. They certainly shocked me, especially as I’ve seen firsthand how rents can rise very quickly in Australia. Of the eight cities modelled - the Australian state capitals as well as Canberra and Darwin - renting and investing the difference resulted in more wealth than owning in twelve of sixteen cases. Renters of two-bedroom flats came out ahead of owners in seven cities, and renters of three-bedroom houses came out ahead in five.

For two-bedroom flats, only Adelaide had the owner end up with higher wealth than the renter. The other cities had the model renter come out ahead. In three cities - Sydney, Melbourne, and Canberra - they ended up with a share portfolio worth over 1.7 times the owner’s home equity. The geometric mean of the ending renter-to-owner wealth ratios was 1.34 in favour of the renter.

A major reason for this shocking result is that all the cities except Darwin, the renter spent less than the owner throughout the modelling horizon, with the average rental spending being 88.1% of apartment owner spending. The renter invested the difference into a low-cost market portfolio of 30% Australian shares and 70% international shares. With the portfolio’s index growing at 8.06% per year from 2006 to 2025, renting and investing the difference led to good financial results.

(Before you ask, the model already accounts for mortgage payments staying the same while rent increases over 20 years. We’ll look at the model and data details later in the article.)

So, okay, I thought - everyone knows that after the early-2010s bubble of new high-rise flats in the inner cities and the bust that came after, you don’t expect capital appreciation for flats. Detached houses are where it’s at! The Australian Dream home would surely have a lot of money in it.

Well, this article is getting to be like an AED because here’s another shock. For three-bedroom houses, only the Adelaide case ended in a clear though still narrow lead for the homeowner with a renter-to-owner wealth ratio of 0.94, while Brisbane and Hobart ended in a dead heat with ending wealth ratios of 0.99 (less than ten grand difference in net worth, in dollar terms). The geometric mean of the ending wealth ratios was 1.21.

In a nutshell, these results are because of the sizable total costs of homeownership, both in terms of cashflow costs like mortgage and maintenance as well as the less clear-cut but perhaps even greater opportunity cost of buying a home.

The model, in summary

If we want to investigate whether owning the home we live in results in superior financial outcomes, we need to analyse the total costs of owning a home and compare that to an alternative: in this case, renting and investing the difference in an equity market portfolio. The alternative of investing in stocks is how we can calculate the opportunity cost of owning, which is what someone gives up (the returns from investing the difference in stocks) when they choose to spend money on something (buying a home).

The model starts in January 2006 with the owner buying a home on a 20% deposit, as well as paying stamp duty and other transaction costs, and signs on to a 25-year variable-rate home loan. Meanwhile, the renter invests the same amount of money as the deposit + stamp duty + other costs, and starts renting a home equivalent to that of the owner.

Each quarter, the homeowner spends money on the mortgage (principal and interest) and other running costs like maintenance, council rates, and depreciation of plant items (for example, aircon and hot water units). The renter pays rent and other expenses like contents insurance and moving costs, and invests the difference between their expenses and the owner’s expenses into their share portfolio. If the owner’s expenses are lower than the renter’s, the renter withdraws the difference from their portfolio.

In any case, the owner and renter always have equal cash flow expenses in the model. The expenses coloured in gray on the charts, like rent and home loan interest, are unrecoverable. But other expenses build equity, like paying off the home loan principal to build home equity and the renter contributing to their portfolio.

Later in this article, I will discuss the model in greater detail and provide the data sources. I will also look at different sensitivities, such as varying the size of the home deposit and considering capital gains taxes, to see how they impact the results.

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Results by city

Sydney

I live in Sydney, the greatest city in the world. (I will accept Winnipeg as a close second.) Believing that it’s the greatest city in the world helped a little bit, though not enough, when I was slugged with massive rent increases from about 2022 to 2024. Not to mention how apartment rents had grown by 4.83% per year, and 4.98% per year for houses, from 2006 to the end of 2025.

So it was a surprise to me when I ran the analysis for (Greater) Sydney and found an ending renter-to-owner wealth ratio of 1.70 for two-bedroom flats. That is, the renter of an average two-bedroom flat ended up with 1.70 times the wealth of the owner of an equivalent flat after 20 years.

To put it another way, the owner had ended up with half a million Australian dollars in home equity - a tidy packet. But the renter-investor ended up with over $850k in their share portfolio, with the index growing by 8.06% per year.

Median apartment prices grew by 4.09% per year but after adjusting for depreciation and renovation costs, they grew by only 2.52% per year. As Australian CPI grew by around 2.72% per year over the period, flats actually lost money in real terms.

I was even more surprised when renting beat out owning for Sydney three-bedroom detached houses as well, albeit at a narrower margin of 1.19. Although the house owner had amassed $1.1 million in home equity, the renter’s portfolio ended at $1.3 million. The owner benefited from median house prices growing by 6.31% per year, the highest level of the eight cities studied, and still a sizable 5.21% per year after adjustments. But the high costs of owning relative to renting in Sydney, with the renter’s cashflow costs being on average 68% of the owner’s, the lowest level of the sixteen cases studied, resulted in the renter being able to invest quite a bit into their portfolio.

Melbourne

Melbourne’s story was similar to Sydney’s. The ending wealth ratio for 2-bedroom flats was 1.74 in favour of the renter, owing to Melbourne’s sluggish growth in apartment prices (2.42% per year, adjusted), especially post-Covid. Cashflow costs for the renter were on average 75% of the owner, the second lowest after Sydney, which meant that the renter was able to build up a significant portfolio throughout the horizon. High growth in apartment rents over the period (5.01% per year), especially towards the end of the modelling horizon (9.34% per year in 2021-25) did lead to the renter becoming cashflow negative relative to the owner and matching the cash difference by withdrawing from their portfolio. However, the Australian and global stock markets continued to make significant gains during that period, leading to a greater wealth gap in favour of the renter.

The gap was less stark for the Melbourne 3-bedroom detached house, where the renter and owner actually kept close to each other until 2023. But after that, with Melbourne house prices stagnating and the global recovery from the 2022 bear market, the renter’s wealth overtook the owner’s with the gap widening over the next two years. The ending renter-to-owner wealth ratio was 1.56, the adjusted house price growth rate was 3.57% per year and rent growth was 4.46%.

Brisbane

Brisbane homeowners benefitted from above average growth for both flats and houses, and insulated from above-average rent increases over the horizon (5.55% p.a. for flats, 4.68% p.a. for houses), both of which primarily happened after the pandemic. But rents were fairly stagnant between 2011 and 2020, meaning that renters had below average cashflow costs (87.3% of the owner’s cashflow for flats, 78.6% for houses) and had more to invest.

As a result, the ending renter-to-owner wealth ratio ended in a dead heat: 1.07 for flats and 0.99 for houses.

Perth

Perth’s story was similar to Brisbane’s: higher than average home price growth and rent increases, most of which came about after Covid. But Perth ended up being quite favourable to renters because after the end of the 2000s mining boom, home prices stagnated and rents actually decreased (both in nominal terms!) between 2013 and 2020.

Lower rent growth meant lower cashflow costs for Perth renters relative to owners (83.5% for flats, 75.5% for houses) with the renter having a lot to invest during the 2010s stock market bull run.

While the post-Covid price growth allowed the owner to catch up somewhat, the renter kept a comfortable lead, with the ending wealth ratio being 1.41 for flats and 1.48 for houses.

Adelaide

Adelaide experienced very high home price growth through the horizon, with 6.06% p.a. for flats (the highest of the eight cities) and 6.30% p.a. for houses (just behind Sydney’s 6.31% p.a.). As with other cities, a lot of this increase came after Covid, with double-digit annual price growth for both flats and houses between 2020 and the end of 2025.

This led to the owner pushing ahead of the renter, with the ending wealth ratios being 0.94 for both flats and houses. (The ending ratios being the same for both cases is just a coincidence.)

Canberra

Canberra had below average home price growth and the lowest rent growth per annum (2.69% for flats, 3.09% for houses) of the eight cities analysed. Both of these made Canberra more favourable for the renter.

The ending renter-to-owner wealth ratios were 1.72 for flats and 1.25 for houses.

Hobart

Hobart had relatively high cashflow costs for renters at over 90% of ownership costs for both houses and flats, as well as above average home price growth, making the city relatively favourable for owners.

The ending renter-to-owner wealth ratios were 1.15 for flats and 0.99 for houses. In both cases Hobart had the third most favourable ending wealth ratio for owners, behind Adelaide and Brisbane.

Darwin

The cost to rent a home in Darwin relative to ownership costs was the highest in the eight cities. Darwin is the only city analysed where the flat renter’s cashflow costs were higher than the owner’s at 103.3%. While the house renter’s cashflow costs were still lower than the owner’s, at 92.4% this is still the highest of the eight cities. This helped the Darwin owner came out ahead of the renter in the first half of the horizon, especially for flats.

But the renter still ended up ahead, with ending ratios of 1.22 for flats and 1.46 for houses. This is primarily because of the high opportunity cost of owning: while the owner built home equity and saved on cashflow costs, they were not able to invest their home deposit and other purchase costs into the stock market like the renter. And with the stock market growing at 8% per year compared to the 3.11% p.a. for Darwin flats and 3.73% p.a. for homes, that meant quite a bit of foregone returns for the homeowner.

The model, in detail

Now let’s talk about the methodology in detail, focusing on the data sources I used for this analysis. For the sickos reading this who want even more detail on data sources and calculations, check out the GitHub repo.

The different Australian states and territories publish median rents for private housing, based on data for new rental bonds (security deposits). Rents were the most challenging data for me to find and process, as the publicly available data cover different time periods and levels of aggregation.

The following sources were used for rent data:

  • Sydney: Rent and sales report, New South Wales Department of Communities and Justice (DCJ).
  • Melbourne: Rental report, Homes Victoria.
  • Brisbane: Median rents data, Queensland Residential Tenancies Authority.
  • Adelaide: Private rent report, South Australian Housing Trust.
  • Perth, Canberra, Hobart, Darwin: Due to the lack of suitable public data, I had to construct composite time series rents for both 2-bedroom units and 3-bedroom houses from the following sources, starting from highest priority:
    • Domain quarterly rental reports.
    • Median weekly rents tables from Ableson and Joyeux (2023).
    • Values from the Rental Affordability Index (RAI) for households renting median two-bedroom dwellings (for apartments) and median three-bedroom dwellings (for houses). For Perth, only the median was available, so I multiplied the median by scalars calibrated to Domain/Ableson and Joyeux values to get median apartment and house rents. For Darwin, no RAI data was available.
    • Interpolation and extrapolation of Ableson and Joyeux data using the city’s rent component of CPI.

Throughout the modelling horizon, the renter also incurs additional costs of $800 per year in December 2025 dollars to represent other renter-specific costs like moving costs and tenant insurance.

Investments

The model assumes that the renter invests the difference between their housing costs and the owner’s housing costs at the start of each quarter into a portfolio of 30% Australian and 70% global shares tracking the MSCI Australia IMI (gross of dividends) and the MSCI World IMI (net of dividends) total return indices. Over the modelling horizon the 70-30 weighted index grew by 8.06% per annum. The expense ratio is set at 0.25% per annum.

Home prices

The following sources were used for home price data:

  • Sydney: Rent and sales report, New South Wales Department of Communities and Justice (DCJ). This dataset separates home sale price by ownership structure (strata and non-strata) rather than dwelling type. I have assumed that strata properties are broadly equivalent to flats and non-strata properties are broadly equivalent to detached houses.
  • Other cities: Total value of dwellings report, Australian Bureau of Statistics. This report separates home sales by type of dwelling (detached houses and attached dwellings).

I have assumed that the median price detached house is comparable to the median 3-bedroom detached house available to both renters and homebuyers, and likewise for the median prices for all units and 2-bedroom units. This assumption is essentially that the home/unit in which the owner resides is comparable to the median 3-bed home/2-bed unit in which the renter resides, which is necessary for the model to make a fair comparison.

Home loan costs

The model assumes that the owner buys the house with a 20% deposit and variable-rate home loan (mortgage) at a 25-year term. These terms are the most common in Australia.

The home loan rate is the variable discounted owner-occupier rate from the Reserve Bank of Australia’s quarterly indicator lending rates dataset.

Home transaction costs

For transaction costs, I have assumed 1.5% of the home value on top of the price when purchasing the home (buyer’s agent, conveyancing), and 1.5% again when selling the home for the seller’s agent commission, according to Kaczerepa (2022). When purchasing the home, the owner also pays stamp duty, which is calculated as it would have been on 1 January 2006 in the state/territory. Stamp duty ends up being 3-4% of home value. Both the commission and stamp duty are added to the owner’s cashflow costs.

When selling the home, an additional 0.5% in other costs is added to the 1.5% commission to form the total cost of selling the home. This 2% is deducted from the reported home equity figure.

Depreciation, maintenance, & renovation costs

Felix and Bin Arif use 1% of home prices for depreciation and 1/3 of gross rents for maintenance, with the simple average for both in their sample of Canadian cities being 2.66% of home prices.

Fox and Tulip (2014) look at 2010-11 tax statistics from the Australian Tax Office (ATO) and calculate home ownership running costs (council rates, maintenance, and plant depreciation) of 35.8% of rental income or 1.5% of property value. Using the same method with 2022-23 ATO data gets between 29.3% in Western Australia and 40.6% in Queensland with a simple average of 33.2% so the methodology still holds up.

The model has 35% of rent to cover total home ownership running costs, or 1-1.5% of home prices. This is represented as an additional cashflow cost.

Stapledon (2007, 2012) concluded that from 1960 to 2005, alterations and renovations contributed 1.15 percentage points a year to Australian home values and depreciation reduced home values by 1.06 percentage points a year.

I have chosen to model the owner’s home depreciating in value by 1% of the original purchase price per year, and reduce home price growth by 1.15 percentage points per year to account for renovations and alterations. These result in the adjusted home price which is used in the model to calculate home equity.

The adjusted home price grows quite a bit less than the median home price. This is appropriate because the median home in 2025 is not the median home in 2006 that the owner bought: part of the reason home prices have grown is because of renovations which represent an investment cost. To accurately compare the wealth outcomes of homeownership with an alternative, the model cancels out the effect of renovations on aggregate housing prices.

“But what about…”

The model here makes many assumptions: 20% down payment, not considering capital gains taxes for the equity portfolio, and not considering superannuation. Changing these parameters can affect the end result in multiple ways, though perhaps not as much as one would expect. If you want to try your own settings for each of these parameters, or combining multiple parameters, check out the GitHub repo!

…leverage?

One frequently cited advantage of buying a house is that it is the easiest way for a typical individual investor to lever up their investments, amplifying their potential return. For example, if someone buys a million dollar home with a 20% down payment ($200k) and then the house value goes up 10% to $1.1 million, they essentially get a 50% return because their net worth has increased by $100k just from the $200k down payment.

But this leverage is no free lunch, as amplifying potential return also amplifies the downside risk of the investment; with the same example above, if the house value had instead gone down 10% to $900k, they’d take a 50% loss as their net worth went down from $200k to just $100k. This leverage also comes with the substantial cost of debt interest. In our model, with home loan rates being above 5% from 2006 to 2014, home loan debt interest were significant cashflow and opportunity costs that reduced the returns of highly leveraged home buyers.

Lower leverage for buying a home, i.e. buying it in cash, meant lower downside risk for the homeowner and much lower cashflow costs due to not having to pay a mortgage. But this also meant higher opportunity costs as the value of the home is locked up in the home instead of being invested in shares, partially cancelling out the benefits.

Varying leverage did not significantly change the ending outcomes, although increasing leverage with a 5% home deposit marginally worsened ending outcomes for homeowners and decreasing leverage by buying the home in cash somewhat improved ending outcomes for homeowners. One other thing to note is that in the 5% down payment case, the homeowners often went into negative equity around 2009, when home prices dropped and the homeowners had not paid the mortgage long enough to build significant home equity.

…taxes?

Principal places of residence are very tax-efficient in Australia, as they are exempt from capital gains tax (CGT). Meanwhile, investing in shares in a taxable account means paying CGT when selling.

The model base case does not model the effects of CGT. The owner pays the mortgage and other costs with post-income-tax money, and the renter pays the rent and invests the difference with the same post-income-tax money. In effect, the base case of the model assumes that the renter is making non-concessional contributions into superannuation, as they are contributing their earnings after paying income tax but not having to pay CGT.

Modelling the effect of taxes would have made the analysis more complicated while reducing the applicability of the results to people’s real-life situations. Accurately modelling taxation would have required specifying many more details including personal income, assets, and withdrawal rates. All that just to get outdated post-tax outcomes anyway, thanks to the Albanese Government’s capital gains tax changes in the May 2026 budget that replaced the 50% discount method with taxing capital gains after indexation of the cost base for inflation.

That said, changing the model to have the renter invest in a taxable account and thus accounting for capital gains tax has a moderate effect on the outcome. Modelling the 50% capital gains discount method that applied during this time period with a 32% tax rate (30% income tax + Medicare levy) led the ending renter-to-owner wealth ratio for Sydney 3-bedroom houses to decrease from 1.19 to 1.06. Still favouring the renter, but only just.

Meanwhile, if the CGT changes from the May budget had historically applied - or rather, if John Howard’s CGT changes hadn’t gone through, as the May budget’s changes was just a return to the original method - the ending wealth ratio for Sydney houses would have decreased further to 0.96 under the same 32% tax rate. Other cities had the same noticeable but moderate shift of ending wealth ratio, shifting 10-20 percentage points towards the owner when applying the 50% discount method and a further 8-12 points if the indexation method is used instead.

You may note that this sensitivity did not add on taxes on earnings. That’s because taxation on earnings is already accounted for in the base model: for global equities, I used the MSCI World IMI (net of dividends), i.e. accounting for withholding taxes on dividends. The withholding tax on global shares is likely to be lower than what the MSCI World IMI (net) index assumes, since the index assumes a fairly tax-inefficient investment structure without double taxation treaty benefits. The Australian portion of the portfolio would have franking credits largely cancel out the tax on dividends, so using the MSCI Australia IMI (gross of dividends) index is appropriate. And if you’re investing in superannuation, you may even get more in franking credits than you have to pay tax on dividends!

If you’re still not satisfied then take the model and set the expense ratio to 1.00% or something.

…super?

One very powerful method of tax minimisation that the renter can access with their extra cashflow is making concessional contributions into superannuation. The renter can use their extra cashflow to make concessional contributions into super, a very powerful method of tax minimisation. In fact, as the owner has to pay for a down payment and mortgage through earnings after income tax, while the renter can invest with concessional tax benefits, this benefit may be even more powerful than the CGT exemption for a primary home. (Although the First Home Super Saver Scheme does mean that part of a down payment can benefit from tax concessions in super, this was not available to home buyers in 2006.)

If the renter was able to invest all of their spare cashflow relative to the owner (including the down payment) as concessional contributions into super, the ending wealth ratio would be 15-25 points to the renter’s favour if their marginal income tax rate (including Medicare levy) was 32% and a further 15-25 points to the renter’s favour if their marginal tax rate was 47%.

A fair question to ask here is if the renter would have room in their concessional contributions cap for a six-figure equivalent of a down payment and up to $25,000 a year in spare cashflow after that. The answer is yes; we can assume that as the owner saves up for a down payment, the renter mirrors the owner’s investment but is investing in super and claiming concessional contributions, and there are ways to have enough room to contribute even for high-income individuals, such as carrying forward contribution caps or making spousal contributions.

…debt recycling? Or something else?

Maybe later. I just wanna get this post out and I’ve got a full-time job and the next half a dozen weekends booked so I don’t have time right now ;_;

So what?

After looking through all these numbers, tables, and charts, the natural answer should be, so what? These are numbers in a model that do not perfectly reflect reality. These are historical figures, and don’t tell us about how these outcomes will change in the future.

Well, there are a couple of things we can learn from this exercise. First, and perhaps most importantly, a lot of the conventional wisdom around renting versus owning doesn’t seem to be holding up when interrogated with data and evidence. As renting and investing the difference in this model provided comparable (or better) financial outcomes to owning, popular beliefs like “renting is throwing money away” and “renting is just paying your landlord’s mortgage” don’t seem to hold up. Rather, renters who are disciplined and prudent so that they invest the difference - and will do so over many years - have a decent chance. And the model results show that historically they even moved ahead!

We can also see that the costs of owning that are often not considered in detail, such as maintenance and depreciation costs but perhaps most importantly the opportunity cost of owning a primary home rather than renting and investing the difference, can have a significant impact on ending wealth outcomes. Other purported benefits of homeownership, like accessing leverage, also don’t seem to be the silver bullet that it’s often claimed to be, also because of costs that are often not modelled rigorously.

Two potential criticisms of this article that I want to address are “this model isn’t relevant because no renter would ever invest the difference”, and “but the benefits of homeownership are more than financial”. First, personal finance is personal. No one is the same: some people can and have invested the difference, and some people are more suited to the renting life. Second, if people understood the financial costs and tradeoffs they are making then they can make decisions that better suit their personalities and goals. A homeowner who likes owning can nonetheless understand that their home isn’t necessarily the foolproof investment asset that conventional wisdom says it is, and plan accordingly to make sure they don’t end up house poor. Conversely, a renter can understand that they aren’t throwing money away by renting, and use the advantage of their lower cashflow costs by investing the difference instead of… throwing money away!

Thanks for reading

I’m really excited to share this work and I hope it proves interesting, insightful, and useful to you, dear reader. It was a lot of work to do the analysis and research, and it felt like a slog sometimes, especially towards the end of the article writing. But I learned a lot and found out some results that I think were insightful, so I really enjoyed it! If you liked this article please share it around. If you hated this article, please share it around AND discuss/correct the flaws that you find here!

(All views in this post are my own and do not represent those of any of my employers, past or present.)

Thanks for reading,

Hatta

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Works cited

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State Revenue Office of Tasmania. Rates of duty [property transfer duties]. https://www.sro.tas.gov.au/property-transfer-duties/rates-of-duty. Accessed 13 August 2026.

Changelog

Date Change
2026-09-12 Initial publication of post
2026-09-13 Minor edits to clarify wording
2026-09-16 Added changelog & added “but what about” subsections to ToC
2026-09-16 Clarification in taxes section