Renter boom: Apartments filling up faster in Seattle area than anywhere in the U.S.
By Mike Rosenberg / The Seattle Times
The Seattle area is filling up new apartments faster than any region in the country, suggesting demand for housing is starting to catch up with the record construction boom — not a great sign for tenants hoping landlords get desperate and drop rents.
The new figures offer fresh insight into the years-long, multibillion-dollar experiment being waged by developers as they, build more apartments in the city of Seattle this decade than in the previous half-century combined, betting on the long-term economic health of the region. Will enough renters eventually materialize to fill them, or will the city have a skyline of empty ghost apartments?
We still don’t know for sure — because it can take years for new buildings to fill up, and a lot of them haven’t even opened yet. But after early signs that the region might be getting overbuilt, things are starting to level out. Apartment vacancy rates, while still historically high, have stopped rising for the first time in years as people start moving into all those new buildings at a quicker pace.
In the first quarter of this year, Greater Seattle filled about 3,400 new apartment units, more than any other metro area in the country, according to new numbers from the real-estate data firm RealPage. (New York had the second most.)
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