That's a theory but in very dense markets it's sometimes the exact opposite, I suspect because people understand rent as "lost money" vs. loan repayments as "in

That's a theory but in very dense markets it's sometimes the exact opposite, I suspect because people understand rent as "lost money" vs. loan repayments as "invested money". Where I live, in Paris, if you take a mortgage today for 20 years, your repayments are going to be around x2/x2.5 the monthly rent of the place. The returns on real estate are notoriously very low. That's because speculation and foreign investment drive prices up while rents can't really increase because the people who live in the flats are already spending 40-45% of their income on rent. I live in a one-bedroom for which the rent is 1200€, and it would cost around 480,000€ to acquire. With a good interest rate on 20 years, that's 2600€ monthly repayment.