> I can't live in a bunch of Amazon stock. You can certainly sell the stock and rent a house. Also, stocks don't have maintenance fees and ownership taxes, on

> I can't live in a bunch of Amazon stock. You can certainly sell the stock and rent a house. Also, stocks don't have maintenance fees and ownership taxes, only taxes when you sell. Housing has both those fees and is highly illiquid, you have to pony up a couple of hundred thousand up front, and the transaction fees are not inconsiderable. I'm not sure what your point is. My assertion is that rent and housing prices should be tightly correlated, with rent higher than housing prices because of the maintenance, HOA (if applicable) and property taxes. When rent is lower than an average mortgage of the same type of property, definitely rent. For example, if rent for a two bedroom condo was 500 dollars a month and it was selling for 600k, would you still decide to buy?