Median apartment rents in Seattle have increased dramatically during the past year due to low rates of vacancy and a climb from falling prices at the start of the pandemic, according to an industry tracker.

Apartment List just released its national rent report, and its findings provide an image of an increasingly costly Seattle for renters. The report finds that rent in Seattle increased by 18.9% over the past year, considerably higher than the national average increase of 17.1% during that same time.

“So far the rent growth we’ve seen this year has been slower than what we saw last year, but still above expected averages,” said senior research associate Rob Warnock.

As per the report, the median monthly rent of a two-bedroom apartment in the city of Seattle weighs in at a staggering $2,097– over seven hundred dollars more per month than the nationwide average of $1,306. One-bedrooms in Seattle are similarly high, climbing to $1,681 against a national average of $1,139.

High demand for housing and low apartment vacancy have provided landlords across the country with an opportunity to increase rent. Though other factors such as inflation, construction costs, and wage growth contribute to rent trends, Warnock said these high occupancy rates are the driving force behind skyrocketing rent.

“With how expensive homes are for sale and how limited inventory is in the for sale market, that keeps more people renting, and it also keeps folks who would have previously been wealthy enough to buy homes in the rental market,” Warnock said.

Rents widely dropped as the pandemic emerged and people stopped moving into new apartments. Once people began to move again further into the pandemic, the demand for housing returned unevenly throughout the country and resulted in a longer road to recovery for dense urban cores.

Warnock said that while relatively suburban cities neighboring major urban corridors bounced back from the initial decline in rent prices at the start of the pandemic in just three to six months, the dense city cores have taken closer to 24 months to reach their pre-pandemic rent prices.

The report offers a glimpse beyond just the city of Seattle to include the metropolitan area as well, stretching from Puyallup in the south to Everett in the north, revealing similar increases throughout the region.

According to Warnock, cities further from the core of dense urban centers were less impacted by these drops in rent, instead continuing to grow with little interruption.

“What we’re left with today is Seattle, where rent prices have returned to their pre-pandemic level, and the neighboring remainder of the metropolitan area, where we have rent prices that are up 20% from where they were before the pandemic,”

Of all the cities within the Seattle metro area, Bellevue saw the largest increase over the past year, jumping by 20.9%. This brings Bellevue to have the most expensive rent in the area, where the median two-bedroom apartment will run you $2,573– a harsh increase from its most recent low of $2,059 in January 2021, and a shocking price tag that sits at nearly twice the national average.

“People typically expect that the Seattle’s of the world, they’re going to be more expensive than the Bellevue’s, from a renting perspective, but as it turns out it’s not uncommon for nearby suburbs to have more expensive median rents than the core urban area,” Warnock said.

This phenomenon can be attributed to the variety of apartment types located in urban cores, consisting of more expensive high-end apartments as well as relatively more affordable ones. Suburban areas, on the other hand, tend not to have as many low-income apartments. Warnock also said that cities like Bellevue draw the increasing number of renters seeking homes outside of city cores on the urban-suburban divide.

On the opposite end of the report is Lakewood, which maintains the least expensive rent in the Seattle metro area, growing a comparatively small 11.9% in the past year– far slower than the nationwide climb of 17.1%– leaving the median cost of a two-bedroom apartment at $1,540, over one thousand dollars less than the Bellevue equivalent.

Though not the most affordable in the region, Tacoma is the sole city in the Seattle metro area where rents fell during the past month rather than increasing, dropping by 0.2%.

The report was compiled with a methodology formulated and utilized by Apartment List since 2017. This method of data compilation was specifically designed to avoid the over-representation of luxury apartments in the Apartment List rent reports, which the company claims has yielded some level of success. The effect of eviction moratoriums was not measured in the Apartment List report and would be difficult to quantify.

Warnock said rent growth this year has been slower than that of the past year, though still above expected averages. Though there are signs the market is slowing down somewhat, rent growth is not necessarily reversing course. He advised that changes in rent correlate with the time of year, with prices increasing during the summer due to more people moving, and that declining prices are not usually seen until winter.

“I think it’s a good model for a lot of the urban regions across the country. We see a similar thing happening in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Boston, D.C., Miami, all having this type of rent changes, very much tied with density and urbanism,” Warnock said.

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