Nothing that I felt was even vaguely worth renting was available. This is a huge one. Most buy/rent arguments seem to assume that for any given area and type of property you will always have the choice of renting or buying an equivalent property. This has not been my experience at all. Being willing to buy opens up a much bigger and better selection of property to choose from. Any other argument is pretty much secondary to that one.

Also having crunched the numbers for our particular scenario, buying made financial sense. There is also a perceived feeling of security and stability that comes from owning. But really all of this is very much secondary to my first point.