A Three-Year Assignment in Boston: Buy or Rent?

A three-year posting is the hardest version of this question, and I get it more than any other.

Ten years, buy. One year, rent. Three years sits exactly on the line, which is why people go around in circles on it — and why the answer has to come from arithmetic rather than instinct.

The thing that makes a short hold different

A long-term buyer pays the costs of buying once and forgets about them. Over ten years they disappear into the background.

On a three-year hold you pay to get in and you pay to get out, and the second bill arrives before the first one has been absorbed. That is the whole difficulty. Everything else is detail.

There is a second problem that gets less attention. Your exit date is not yours to choose. A ten-year owner who dislikes the market simply waits. You cannot wait — your assignment ends when it ends, and you sell into whatever conditions exist that season.

What the exit actually costs

One piece is fixed by law and you can calculate it exactly today.

The Massachusetts deeds excise is two dollars per five hundred dollars of consideration under the statute, plus a 14% surtax, which works out to $2.28 per $500 — about 0.456% of the sale price. It is paid by the person making and signing the deed, meaning the seller. Barnstable County uses a different rate.

On an $800,000 sale:

$800,000 ÷ $500 = 1,600 units × $2.28 = $3,648

That number is knowable and will not surprise you.

Everything else varies, and I am deliberately not giving you a percentage for it. Broker compensation has been openly negotiable since the 2024 industry changes, and quoting a customary rate as though it were a fixed cost would mislead you in both directions. Attorney fees, title work, recording, and any lender charges likewise depend on the transaction.

So do this instead: get real quotes and put your own numbers in. An estimate built from your actual costs is worth more than any average I could print here.

The framework

Buying beats renting over the hold if:

(what you save versus renting) + (principal you pay down) + (any price change) is greater than (cost of buying) + (cost of selling) + (ownership costs rent does not have)

Four notes on using it honestly.

Principal paydown is not a cost. It comes back to you at the sale. But in the early years of a 30-year loan the payment is mostly interest, so do not overestimate how much of it there is by year three — check an amortization schedule for your actual loan rather than guessing.

Rent is entirely gone. That is the point in favor of buying, and it is a real one.

Ownership has costs renting does not: property tax, insurance, condo fees, maintenance, and anything the building assesses. Massachusetts property tax rates are set town by town and published annually, so use the actual rate for the actual town, not a regional average.

Enter zero for price change unless you have a reason not to. If the decision only works with an assumed gain, it does not work. Run it flat, then see what a decline would do to you.

Where three years is genuinely different

There is one rule that makes three years better than two, and it is worth knowing before you sign anything.

The capital gains exclusion on a primary residence turns on having owned and lived in the home for two of the five years before the sale. A three-year assignment clears that bar; a shorter one may not. The details, including how the months are counted, are in this article.

That has a consequence people miss when they decide to keep the home as a rental instead of selling. The five-year window keeps running after you move out. Hold it as a rental for too long after returning to Korea and you can age out of the exclusion you had already earned. If keeping it is on the table, work out that deadline with an accountant before you leave, not years later.

And if you do sell after you are no longer a US resident, FIRPTA withholding applies at closing. It is not a penalty and it is not the final tax, but it changes what you receive on the day and it needs planning.

Before you buy, if renting it out is part of the plan

If the property is a condominium, read the association documents for rental restrictions first. Plenty of associations cap the share of units that may be rented, impose minimum lease terms, or require board approval. Discovering this after closing has ended more than one plan. What to look for is in reading a condo fee.

What tips it each way

Buying is more likely to work when:

• rent for the space your family actually needs is high
• there is a real chance the assignment extends
• you are buying something ordinary and easy to resell — not the unusual property that took two years to sell last time
• you are not stretching to the top of what you were approved for

Renting is the better answer when:

• the return date is fixed and cannot move
• your cash reserves are thin, so a bad month at sale time becomes a real problem
• the property is unusual, or the building’s finances are unclear
• you would need the sale proceeds immediately on returning

A word on how this usually goes wrong

The mistake I see is not choosing wrong. It is deciding in month one — house-hunting from Korea, buying in the first eight weeks, before anyone in the family knows which commute they can tolerate or which town they actually like.

Renting first for a year and buying in year two is a legitimate strategy and often the better one. It shortens the hold, which cuts the other way, but it also means you buy the right thing. If you are new to the process, the common first-time mistakes and the vocabulary of a Massachusetts purchase are both worth twenty minutes.

One caveat

This is a framework, not advice about your situation. Tax treatment belongs to an accountant, loan terms to a lender, and visa questions to an immigration attorney — and if you are here on a work visa, what lenders actually require is a separate and more encouraging story than most people expect.

What I do is sit down and run these numbers with you, in Korean as well as English, using your actual quotes rather than averages. Some families leave that conversation renting, and that is a good outcome too. Get in touch and we will find out which one you are.