Conor Zayid
Founder, Rent vs Buy
Conor Zayid founded Rent vs Buy out of a conviction that most people making the largest financial decision of their lives are working from oversimplified math. The conventional wisdom — that buying is always better than renting, or that renting is throwing money away — collapses when you run the actual numbers for a specific market, a specific interest rate environment, and a specific timeline. This site exists to provide those numbers.
Background
Conor holds a degree in economics. His undergraduate research focused on how changes to government wildfire hazard maps affect residential real estate valuations — an early study in how policy decisions and data revisions move housing markets in ways that buyers and sellers rarely anticipate. That research required building models that connected public risk data to transaction prices across California markets, and it developed an appreciation for how much the “right answer” in real estate depends on which assumptions you make and which data you trust.
After graduating, he spent five years in data consulting, working with clients across several industries. A meaningful portion of that work involved real estate clients — companies that needed to make defensible, data-grounded decisions about acquisition, pricing, and market entry. That work reinforced a pattern he had noticed in his research: people in housing markets are often working from simplified mental models that don't hold up under scrutiny.
Outside of professional work, Conor has spent years reading extensively about American housing development, housing policy, and the financial mechanics of home purchases — from the history of the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage to the effects of exclusionary zoning on urban affordability. He built Rent vs Buy because he wanted the kind of analysis he couldn't find anywhere else: market-specific, data-grounded, and honest about the assumptions that drive the outcome.
Areas of Focus
- City-level buy vs. rent financial modeling
- Housing market conditions and local policy context
- Mortgage economics and tax treatment of homeownership
- Net worth trajectory analysis for buyers vs. renters
- US housing development and supply policy
Contact
You can reach Conor through the contact page.