WASHINGTON — With the rent in Western Washington higher than ever and a newly passed statewide rent cap, many are wondering when they will see some sort of rent relief.
Some experts believe the rental market has entered a window that’s much friendlier to renters looking for a deal.
“It was crazy expensive for like, you know, barely 1,000 square foot,” said Taylor Baber, whose rental home in Renton took a while to find. She started her search in Seattle and went south.
“Renton seems like it’s poised for a little boom,” Emma Davis, CEO of Pointe3 Real Estate and Seattle Rental Group, said.
She started noticing a change in the rental market overall in September and October, just after Baber was searching.
“We already had the sort of normal fall slowdown, and things are definitely a little bit slower on top of that too,” she said. “With the single-family properties that we see, those ones have been sitting. In the past, we used to say to owners, ‘it’ll take about 14 days to rent your place.’ Now we’re saying 30 days, maybe even 45 days to rent, and we are seeing some price drops.”
She said the apartment communities are a bit different.
“A lot of times we’ll see those guys react a little bit later in the market,” she said. “What we’ve seen in the apartments is they’re just now starting to do more concessions and starting to offer those this month.”
So, is now a good time to start looking for a place to rent?
“I think so. I think there’s room right now to be able to find a good rate, to negotiate a little bit and to get something locked in. And again, we are anticipating a January rush… the normal spring trends are anticipated by all the economists, [the trends] that we would normally see. So, if you are thinking of moving, now’s a good time to go look for a place," Davis said.
The latest Zillow data shows rent growth slowing. In the greater Seattle metropolitan area, the typical single-family rental, like a house, was $3,342 a month, up 3.3% from last year.
Typical multi-family housing, like an apartment, was $2,089 a month, up 2.0% year over year.
“I’m hopeful that we’re going to continue to see rents flatten and eventually even decline slightly, especially for apartment rents, because that’s where most of the building, most of the new construction has been,” said Zillow senior economist Orphe Divounguy.
Still, Davis believes Western Washington needs lot more of what’s called “middle housing.”
“Medium-sized apartment buildings, some townhouses, and things like that mixed in, would definitely increase the inventory,” Davis said.
Divounguy agreed, saying: “The bad news is that rents remain very elevated, very high and it’s going to take a lot more housing.”
Divounguy said cities need to think about reducing regulations.
“Things like minimum parking requirements, or minimum lot sizes, those are things that actually add costs to builders,” he said. “And so if we could go over those things and change them in order to lower a builder’s cost, that’s a step in the right direction.”
In fact, cities are making zoning changes in response to a statewide bill that passed in 2023 designed to increase housing types.
KIRO 7 reached out to Tacoma, Renton, Everett, and Seattle; and each city told us in the past year, they’ve created new zones for middle housing.
Seattle said it’s started a citywide initiative to cut housing permitting timelines by 50%.
“I’m hopeful that we’re going to continue to see rents flatten and eventually even decline slightly, especially for apartment rents,” Divounguy said.
But landlord Liat Arama thinks rents could head the opposite direction.
“I don’t think we’re at our highest,” she said.
Arama and her husband own about 150 housing units and run a property management company, Keasy.
She pointed to Washington state’s new law that limits landlords from raising rent by more than 10% a year.
“The first thing that happened after that thing passed, I mean, the next day, every landlord I worked with called me and said, ‘I want an auto increase to the max,’’” she said.
Arama said landlords are worried about unforeseen costs that could require large expenditures— and then being unable to adjust the rent accordingly.
She also cited rising insurance costs and property taxes, as well as a longer eviction process, with winter and school year moratoriums in some cities.
“Eviction used to take, end-to-end, three months,” she said. “It now takes between six to nine and sometimes even a year.”
She’s less optimistic about a cooling rental market.
“We don’t increase rent because we want to,” she said. “We increase rent because we’re a business and we have to.”
If you’re a renter looking for a new place now, Seattle Rental Group offered some tips on what to ask for in negotiations:
- Asking for certain amenities for free, or at a discount-- like parking.
- You can also ask for discounted rent or a free month or try negotiating a longer lease term up front.
- They said individual landlords, like the owners of homes or condos, have a lot more leeway than big companies and are willing to work with good renters.
©2025 Cox Media Group
