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Renting vs. Buying Real Estate: See the Cost Difference in These 4 Nevada Cities

August 1, 2024

3 min Read

Written by Josephine Nesbit

Edited by Nicholas Morine

Houses in the Desert, Whitney Ranch, Henderson, Nevada.

jezdicek / iStock.com

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As home prices continue to rise, along with higher mortgage rates, home insurance costs and other housing expenses, it may make more financial sense to rent than to buy a home. But this isn’t the case everywhere, including some of the most populated cities in Nevada.

According to an analysis from CBRE, a firm that tracks real estate prices, it costs households 38% more, on average, to buy a home than to rent. The analysis found that this gap between buying and renting will continue to be a challenge for hopeful homeowners for at least the next five years.

The biggest factor behind these unaffordable home prices is the nationwide housing shortage. According to the CBRE report, there’s an estimated shortage of 3.8 million housing units in the U.S., particularly concerning single-family homes and small multi-unit residences.

Renters are also severely cost-burdened. A report from the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies found that rents across the nation have skyrocketed 26% since early 2020. Also, half of all tenant households were cost-burdened as of 2022, meaning they spend more than 30% of their household income on housing and utilities.

Nevada Housing Market Seeing Price Surges

In Nevada, even some six-figure earners struggle to afford a house in Washoe County, where home prices have surged 46% since 2019 to $580,000. According to an NBC News index, the county ranked in the top 200 out of 1,300 measured when it comes to difficulty buying a home.

GOBankingRates recently conducted research to determine the difference in prices between renting and buying a home. Out of the four cities located in Nevada in the analysis, renting was a cheaper option in all of the cities. Here’s a cost breakdown of renting versus owning real estate in Las Vegas, Henderson, Reno and North Las Vegas.