While housing market balances out, Seattle rent continues skyward
Sep 3, 2019, 6:10 AM
While buying a house continues to get more affordable in the Puget Sound region, Seattle renters still have it tough.
August marked the eighth consecutive month with median rent increasing in the city.
Report: Seattle rent prices among highest in the entire country
Per the latest data from Apartment List, between July and August, Seattle rent increased 0.5 percent, along with a 1.3 percent year-over-year increase to boot. And while this is behind the national year-over-year average of 1.5 percent, it’s still a stark contrast to the city’s increasingly more manageable housing market.
The most recent report from the S&P CoreLogic Case-Schiller home-price index showed Seattle as the only major city in the U.S. not to see a year-over-year increase for housing prices between June 2018 and 2019.
In King County, median residential home prices dropped almost 3 percent year-over-year in June. Seattle’s prices have cooled even more, dropping 5 percent year-over-year, and with Zillow predicting another 3.9 percent drop within the next year.
Meanwhile, you’d be hard-pressed to find a city in the Puget Sound region that isn’t getting increasingly more expensive to rent in. Locales from Everett all the way down to Lakewood saw sizable year-over-year increases in median two-bedroom rent in August. The latter saw the highest increase of any city in the Seattle metro area, sitting around 4.5 percent, three times the national average.
Buying a home in Seattle was the hardest thing I’ve ever done
Back in July, Seattle grabbed the dubious honor of being nation’s most expensive large city for renters outside of California, trailing only San Jose, San Francisco, and San Diego.
Bellevue still holds the title of having the most expensive rent in the region, at $2,420 for median two-bedroom rates. That marked a 0.4 growth between July and August, and a 2.4 percent year-over-year bump.
Nationally, Seattle’s median two-bedroom rent of $1,700 sits just above Vancouver, Wash., and right behind Los Angeles. San Francisco continues to boast the highest rent among major cities in the U.S., at $3,130 a month.
