Figures here are illustrative. They describe how something works, not what any place has returned.

A second house is bought on a number everybody discusses and held on several nobody does. The purchase is negotiated hard, examined by a lawyer and slept on. What follows it is absorbed a line at a time, and by the time it is visible it has become normal.

The costs that do not appear in the decision

• Somebody local who holds the keys, and is paid whether anybody comes or not.
• The garden, which does not pause between visits.
• Municipal dues, insurance and the annual bill nobody predicted.
• The repair that is small when found and structural when found late.
• The drive itself — the part most often left out, and the part paid every single time.

Individually each is minor. Together they behave like a subscription to a house, and the subscription does not scale down when the house is empty. That is the whole difficulty: the cost is a function of the calendar, and the use is a function of how far away it is.

Divide by the nights, not by the year

The instructive figure is not annual cost. It is annual cost divided by the number of nights somebody actually slept there.

Almost nobody performs this division, and the reason is not innumeracy. It is that the answer tends to be a number people would rather not carry around, and there is no moment in owning a house that forces you to calculate it.

Do it anyway. If a house costs a lakh a month to hold and is used twenty-four nights, each night cost fifty thousand rupees before anybody ate anything. That is not an argument against the house. It is an argument for knowing the number.

The part that arrives ten years later

The version of this that surprises people is generational. A house bought for a young family is used most in the years the children are small, less through the years they are not, and then reaches a moment where it belongs to people who did not choose it.

Sometimes they love it. Often they inherit a maintenance obligation attached to somebody else's memory of a place, in a location they would not have picked, and cannot easily sell because it is held between siblings who disagree.

Three honest answers

Rent. If the total is a handful of nights a year, renting is cheaper, more varied and ends cleanly. Most people who ask this question should rent, and it is worth us saying so.

Buy, and use it properly. Buying works when it is close enough to be used without a plan, and when the holding cost has been divided by a realistic number of nights rather than an optimistic one.

Or hold part of something better. Fractional structures exist because the sums above do not improve with a nicer house — they improve with a smaller share of the standing cost. We build one of those, which is exactly why the first answer had to come first.