Why Seattle Apartments Are So Expensive and Staying That Way

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Ed: This is the third in Michael Luis’s series on Seattle’s high housing prices.
The first two articles are here, and here. Editor’s Note: The story was posted without the author’s concluding paragraphs. They are now appended to the end of the story. Apologies to readers.

In an urban area, the great majority of low-cost housing consists of apartments in older buildings in less fashionable neighborhoods with few amenities and upgrades. Think of a typical walk-up building with surface parking, no elevators or corridors, laminate countertops, basic appliances, vinyl and cheap carpet on the floor, and maybe even a popcorn ceiling.

Not a very attractive thought for those who can afford better, but bear in mind that the region is home to tens of thousands of residents of modest means who cannot get access to the limited supply of subsidized housing and will want to live in such places. Despite all the efforts to produce more subsidized housing, the great majority of “affordable” housing will be found in older apartments that started out middle market and have been allowed to filter down. The problem is that we have stopped producing the kinds of buildings that will, over time, add to that stock of inexpensive apartments. Meanwhile, fewer of the existing candidates can be counted on to become affordable.

Apartments are a commodity, and on one level, rents should be a simple function of supply and demand, as mediated by vacancy rates. When vacancy rates are high, renters have the upper hand, and when such rates are low, building owners have the upper hand. But, of course, it isn’t that simple.

In this article, third of our housing-cost series, we look at factors that have been keeping apartment prices high in the Seattle area.

Factor I: Lags between demand and supply changes

Developing an apartment building is an act of faith that enough new renters will be coming into the market when the building opens. It takes a minimum of several years to get a building designed, permitted, and built, and a lot can happen in a local economy during that time to affect demand.

No one could have anticipated the massive hiring by technology firms starting in 2020. Vacancy rates plunged from about 5.5 percent pre-pandemic to 3.6 percent by September 2021. Rents shot up accordingly, increasing 17 percent from pre-pandemic to their peak in 2022. Projects that were under construction opened in this timeframe, but it was impossible to get more apartments on the market in response to the big jump in demand..

In economic terms, the supply of apartments is far less elastic than the demand for them, so quick increases in demand result in large price increases. Unfortunately for renters, this process does not always work in reverse.

Factor II: What goes up does not always come down

Apartment rents tend to exhibit a strong ratchet effect: they go up as demand outstrips supply, but they don’t always come down right away when supply outstrips demand. Landlords just hate to lower rents if they can possibly help it. 

In a stable building, most apartments are occupied by people with leases that lock in their rent. Imagine that you signed a lease for $1,800 per month, and a few months later, your neighbor gets a lease for $1,500. You would not be very happy, and you will press the landlord for lower rent now, or certainly when your lease is up. So will everyone else in the building, resulting in chaos with each lease renewal. This is a situation that landlords would really like to avoid.

The preferred method of filling apartments during a glut is to offer “incentives.” This might be a month or two of free rent, a break on parking fees, or a free toaster. That means the lease itself will be signed with something close to the rent being paid by existing tenants. The new tenant will get an effective rent break for the first year and existing tenants will be less peeved. The cost of incentives, or even longer vacancies, can be much lower than the cost of renegotiating rents throughout a building or seeing angry tenants move out.

In the Seattle market, vacancy rates bottomed out at 3.6 percent in September 2021 and have climbed steadily since then, reaching over 6 percent in March 2023. Rents kept climbing, however, and did not peak until August 2022. Since then rents have fallen only about 7 percent. 

But those are averages, and how the rent and incentive game is played in individual buildings depends on the objectives and constraints of the building owner.

Factor III: Differing investor objectives

Consider that there are different types of investors that own apartment buildings, each with different objectives that will determine their strategy for managing rents and vacancies.

Stability owners. A small building might be owned by a retiree who has owned it for decades, holding little or no debt, and relying on a stable group of tenants for regular rental income. These owners might keep rents especially low to preserve stability, and they can afford to do so since their costs are low. A smaller building might also be owned by a wealthier local investor looking for diversity in their portfolio, and thinking not just of income but also of property appreciation. This investor may also trade lower rents for stability.

Investment owners. Larger complexes tend to be owned by institutional investors who need to park cash in places with good long term prospects. Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) are investment vehicles that bundle portfolios of properties. Pension funds gather massive amounts of cash and need to generate income over long time horizons. University endowments need diverse portfolios. Because these investors usually operate nationwide or globally, and have long time horizons, they may be less concerned with downturns in individual markets and consequently willing to hold the line on rents and accept higher vacancies.

The Puget Sound area market, with its strong underlying economy, has been a hot one for institutional investors for years. This means that developers can find buyers for their new buildings, and, thereby, find investors and lenders for construction. Developers will have less worry about the state of the market the moment they finish with construction. 

At the same time, national investors will also be attracted to older complexes, knowing that they can renovate them and get a good long term payback. Local investors are getting frozen out. Mid-market buildings, which might otherwise filter down in the market, maintain high rents. Institutional investors with deep pockets can keep older buildings from ever becoming affordable.

And, as mid-market buildings get absorbed into national portfolios, we are not building these kinds of complexes any more.


Editor’s Note: The following story on apartment costs was posted without the author’s concluding paragraphs. They are now appended to the end of the story. Apologies to readers.

Factor IV: The action is in urban centers, and they are expensive

A drive on the arterials running through Seattle’s suburbs will reveal thousands of apartments in large, walk-up complexes with surface parking, built in the 1970s and 1980s, and aimed at the middle market. Land was inexpensive and walk-up construction is among the least expensive forms of housing. All that changed starting with plans developed under the state Growth Management Act (GMA).

GMA planning emphasized the development of urban centers that would be less auto dependent and have a greater integration of residential and commercial uses. The old two- and three-story walk-up style buildings, with their large footprints and surface parking, don’t fit this urban-center model. Developers gradually moved away from them and into urban-center buildings. For example, Woodland Commons opened in 1978 in Bellevue with 302 units on 15 acres, and the Blu in Olde Bellevue, opened in 2019 with 135 units on two thirds of an acre, a tenfold increase in density.

The problem is that urban center housing is expensive to build. Most urban center buildings are five stories of wood frame over a concrete podium, with underground parking. Structured parking alone can cost more than $50,000 per space, and even with wood frame, other costs are higher. These apartment buildings have corridors, fire exits, elevators, lobbies, and other non-revenue generating features that walk-ups don’t have. Other cost factors: urban center land is expensive and construction in a tight setting is complicated. Also, take all the costs of five-over-one construction and blow them up for concrete high-rise.

In the 1990s, urban-center-style apartments were viable only in Seattle and some parts of the Eastside. But they have spread throughout the region and are being built in most of the designated urban centers. 

Factor V: The pipeline of affordability has been shut off

The region has been on an apartment-building tear. Between 2010 and 2022, King County added 124,000 apartment units, 80,000 of which were in Seattle. But the overwhelming majority of these units were aimed at the influx of young adults who have moved to the region to work in technology industries, where high wages can support high rents.

The shift from locally owned, walk-up-tyle apartments to institutionally owned urban-center buildings has effectively shut off the pipeline of future affordability. Expensive midrise and high-rise buildings owned by deep-pocketed investors will never filter down to the affordable level, and some of the remaining walk-ups will be renovated or replaced, preventing them from filtering down. Meanwhile, the population in need of affordable housing keeps growing. Government subsidies will never come close to filling the gap. “Affordable” units built by non-profits come in at $400,000 or more per unit and take years to build.

The remedy for this is not obvious. We might start by admitting that large numbers of low and moderate income people would happily live in a less central area, park in a carport, and walk up some stairs in the rain in exchange for rent they can afford.

Michael Luis
Michael Luis
Michael Luis is a public policy consultant who has been wrestling with housing, growth and economic development issues around Washington State for over 30 years. He is author of several books on local history and served as mayor of Medina.

8 COMMENTS

  1. Good summary. Not sure I followed the point at the end, though – if national investors are attracted to mid-market apartment buildings, that would keep them from getting built? Is it because instead they’re being created from refurbished lower market buildings?

    There could be some question as to whether the hot Puget Sound market is a durable phenomenon, but I left my crystal ball behind in the move. Developers who have been around for more than a decade will remember a time when it was pretty chilly.

  2. Hmmm….rents do rise quickly when demand is high, no question. But ultimately they reflect the market. Yes, small investors may not shoot for the moon but when a building goes up for sale it is repriced at current rents and patient owners can reap huge capital gains.
    Your view is that the large complexes owned by REITs are patient. I would disagree. They report net cash flow quarterly and their job performance is often tied to meeting their number.
    And let’s not be fooled by published rent figures. The important number is net income and cash flow. Incentives reduce cash flow.

    The most important factor and one not discussed here is demand pull inflation. With new buildings commanding the highest rents, rents in the alternative, aging buildings are pulled along. We all saw this the last two years in the auto market as limited supply coupled with rapidly rising new car prices resulted is skyrocketing used car prices. Those shiny rental monoliths? The ugly truth is that they drag up rents in the short and medium term. How do we get bailed out? They overbuild.

  3. There is another source for affordable housing that is slipping away — homeowners who want to live in another part of the world temporarily, but don’t wish to sell. These homeowners, and I have known several, have found it way too risky to rent out their homes in this current climate. It’s not that you can’t find a tenant. But you are at the mercy of ridiculous policies enacted by the state and the city of Seattle. I mean, dictating that you must give six months’ advance notice to your tenant, pay relocation fees, etc. Tenants, however, only need give 20 days’ notice to a homeowner. You dare not withhold part of the damage deposit, either — even after egregious damage, which is not at all uncommon from an aggrieved tenant. The only way to protect yourself is to charge higher rent. Or sell.

    • Speaking from my personal experience I would have to disagree with this point. First off, the amount of notice a landlord must give a tenant 30 days written notice to make changes to the terms and conditions of a rental agreement, and 180 days notice for any rent increase (SMC 22.205). That’s not unreasonable, as it provides time for the tenant to decide whether they can absorb the increase or need to seek new housing; and presumably the landlord won’t set the increase so high that they can’t rent the unit, even if the tenant decides to vacate.

      As for withholding the damage deposit, the reason so many are returned is that the landlord was lazy or sloppy and did not properly document the condition of the unit when it was first rented; you can’t claim “damage”, aside from normal wear-and-tear, if you can’t prove it was caused by the tenant. Relocation fees are only required if the unit is to be substantially upgraded or demo’ed for new development, and even then, the tenant must first apply for and qualify to receive relocation assistance, and many tenants exceed the income criteria (in our case, the developer/landlord paid us in order to avoid the process altogether, so essentially it was an incentive to get us to move out in a quicker time-frame.) Finally, the 20 day notice only applies to month-to-month rentals, leases cannot be broken for anything other than the most egregious situations until the end of the designated lease period; and that’s always been the case.

      So, things aren’t quite so tilted toward the tenant as you would lead others to believe, and a good, knowledgeable landlord will understand both their rights and responsibilities, as will the tenant. Are there bad ones on both sides? No doubt. But, the problem today is that large investment and leasing companies don’t really care about stability: the developer needs to unload the unit as quickly as possible to recoup costs, which, as the article points out, continue to increase; landlords need to fill units as quickly as possible in order to generate revenue; and if there’s an imbalance between supply and demand, combined with significantly increasing average wages, which has been the case in this area for a number of years, then the market is tilted toward the owner, and it’s in their vested interest to keep it churning, because they can use that volatility to maintain high rental rates, even when the market downturns or availability increases.

      • Nice try. But anyone who rents out their property must give a tenant a minimum of 180 days advance notice of a rent increase. (RCW 59.18. 140). That is absolutely ludicrous. How does a homeowner pinpoint exactly what their financial situation will be, six month hence?) Not everyone who rents out a home is a greedy avaricious developer straight out of a Dickens novel, as this poster would have us believe. Many are people who simply don’t want to, or can’t afford to live in their homes any longer. I’ve rented out my home twice to tenants who earned well over 120K a year. They snug in dogs that ripped up carpets, they left burned holes in the carpet, and moved out two months’ shy of their lease run-out. Sue them? Yes, good luck with that. The property manager advised, “let it go!” As to withholding a damage deposit because of sloppiness or laziness: no homeowner will rent out a place without documenting the condition. I would sure love to see proof that damage deposits are returned because the homeowner (whom this poster asserts is likely to be a “developer/landlord” and yet, despite being in business, somehow doesn’t know to document the current condition of the unit.)

  4. The one-sided renter laws are helping and hurting. I have a friend who had a small 2 bed/1 bath house in W. Seattle. He rented it out at a reasonable price and his latest (and last) tenant signed the lease and paid with a check on a closed account. She knew it was closed and when he went back to the house to discuss 3 days later, she all but laughed in his face. So he spent over $2,000 on his lawyer and after the normal 3+ month process, the woman left the house right before the legal eviction. So the $2K plus 4 months lost rent caused him to simply sell the house. He felt so burned that he didn’t want to deal with that anymore so that house is no longer on the rental market. Had he been able to get the sheriff to move her out as it was a clear fraudulent effort on her part, he might still have that rental.
    So as more houses go off the rental market, it drives up the prices of what’s left. Even if there was a push to build micro apartments (with the hope of having low cost housing), they would still be expensive because of supply and demand principles. Developers would have to build literally 10s of thousands to create a drop in pricing.

  5. The remedy for this is NOT obvious and “admitting that large numbers of low and moderate income people would happily live in a less central area, park in a carport, and walk up some stairs in the rain in exchange for rent they can afford” is a misleading assumption that ASSUMES that all low income people are no more than sheep that need to be herded to a less expensive pasture so the urban elites can feed in peace.

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