When hotels are not the only option

Office manager Janice de Jesus is one ‘bakasyonista’ who likes the feel of home when she is traveling. She prefers to stay in a rental close to a wet market so she can buy her favorite vegetables and cook for her family.

For her, staying in a hotel is not always the best option. If she can find a rental that allows her the amenities of home, she’d prefer that over a stuffy hotel whose sliding doors you can’t even open.

“Usually when people plan a vacation, they assume that a hotel is the only option available to them,” she said.

An increasing number of people are turning to property rental as an alternative. Whether in the city or deep in the countryside, there are some great opportunities available to people that want to spend a little while in a house or apartment instead of a hotel.

Property rental has over the past few years become more and more popular, as people seek to engage more with the community they’re staying in. In Janice’s travels — for work or family recreation – she’s found holiday homes with their own kitchen. She opted for that during her recent visit to London weeks before the Olympics.

“We were able to visit the local markets for ingredients, which gave us a chance to mingle with the locals and find out more about their food culture,” she said. “It’s also obviously a money-saver, when you can cook your own meals instead of having to find a restaurant three times a day.”

Apartments and houses also offer more space than hotel rooms. In a hotel, you’ll normally find a bed, a table, and a chair, but a fully furnished apartment is often the same price as a hotel, and gives you much more of a sense of freedom, when you have a living area separate to the bedroom.

Obviously, there are some differences. You can’t call room service at 4 in the morning and ask them to make you a sandwich, rather, you have to make it yourself. But the independence is also part of the appeal. You can find many rental properties at this site.

For people able to work from home, a vacation in a rented property can still be productive. Many properties offer Internet access, and a holiday home in the country can be a fantastic way to work and relax at the same time.

In Janice’s recent trip to the U.K., that meant spending half a day working at the computer, and having the other half of the day to cycle through the hills, or go swimming in a nearby lake.

source: thefilam.net

Rent or Buy?

BLANCHING at their rent bills, more New Yorkers are being forced to confront that age-old question, should I rent, or does buying make more sense?

In many cases, the hard numbers point toward the latter. The average Manhattan apartment rented for a record $3,459 in July, according to Citi Habitats, which called the price the highest since it began tracking rents in 2002. And with the vacancy rate hovering around 1 percent, landlords aren’t willing to cut deals.

By contrast apartments for sale have held relatively steady in price from the start of the year and are down from the market peak in 2008. Combine that with low interest rates, and the cost of buying an apartment is about the same, if not cheaper on a monthly basis in many neighborhoods, than the cost of renting. But making the leap to homeownership is complicated by tough lending standards, the often hefty down payments and other obstacles that would-be buyers must clear in order to break into the New York market. And even if you clear all the hurdles, there are often trade-offs.

Take Casey Galegher and Van Krishnamoorthy, who recently spent $699,000 on a two-bedroom condo in Harlem, after a year living in a one-bedroom rental on the Upper West Side with their 5-year-old son, Finn. “It may take 10 years for the restaurants to feel like the Upper West Side,” said Dr. Krishnamoorthy, a radiologist. But meanwhile they are getting more space and amenities for their money, paying about $4,900 a month for their brand-new 1,400-square-foot condo. On the Upper West Side, “we couldn’t get an elevator building in our price range,” said Dr. Krishnamoorthy, noting that a two-bedroom in a doorman building across the street from their former rental was listed at $7,000 a month.

Joan Riegel, a 69-year-old educator, started looking to buy earlier this year, when the rent on her 1,000-square-foot Upper West Side rental climbed past $5,000 a month — an increase of 25 percent. This month she moved into a $675,000 co-op in the Gramercy Park area, trimming her monthly housing cost nearly in half, to about $2,600 a month including maintenance. While her new apartment is smaller, she said, “I’m going to have so much more money.”

In general, whether renting is better than buying largely depends on individual circumstances, including what you can afford, what’s on the market and how long you plan to stay in your home. (The Times has an online calculator to help you pinpoint exactly how long you need to stay for your investment to begin paying off.) Here is a look at how four potential buyers came to resolve their own rent-versus-buy conundrums, including the calculations they made, the hurdles they overcame and the lessons they learned along the way.

source: nytimes.com