LAKEWOOD RANCH, Fla. — After a Lakewood Ranch man spent more than a year looking for a house to buy due to a rising apartment rent, he’s now chosen to rent a home instead, saying prices are still too high.

Mike Bean started looking to buy a home at the beginning of last year when his apartment rent increased by 13% from when he moved in during December 2021.  

He says his rent was about $2,241 a month, which didn’t include other expenses like utilities.

But when he found a house for rent, Mike did the math and said renting the house was actually a better deal for him than renting an apartment.

Since then, he has gone from living in a 700-square-foot apartment to living in a house with more than 2,000 square feet.

“If you take what I was paying in the apartment and add the storage fees, yes, the house is a little higher in price, but not significantly so,” said Bean. “So, it’s a definite benefit for me to be in a much bigger place and also make use of my furniture and enjoy living in a very nice home.”

The extra space allowed him to get his belongings out of storage, cutting down on the money he was paying every month due to the lack of space in the apartment. Now, he can bring some of his most treasured items back into his life.

“It’s great... This is my mother’s piano. It’s part of my family. This is the history of my family. My mother had this piano for years,” he said.

Lei Wedge, an associate professor of finance at USF, says she looked at the data in Manatee County and believes that right now, renting a house could make sense for some people.

“Active homes on the market have very high listing prices in Manatee County,” she said. “But if you look at the past six months, the homes that got rented, their actual closing prices are much, much lower than the asking rates. So, they keep reducing the rent until they get rented out.”

Bean says for him, renting was a “doable” alternative.

“The housing prices here in Florida have gone up quite a lot over the last five years,” he said. “So, people are a little reluctant to pay as high a price for the houses as they originally went up to. And so consequently, as homes have become available for rent, like the one I found here, people might choose that as an alternative to buying a home.”

While Bean would still like to buy a house eventually, he’s content for now.