Today’s news is all about rents. Curbed Seattle has done their monthly aggregation of the various sites comparing current rents to this time last year. Depending on which site you use (they all have different data sets and methodologies) rents are up anywhere from 5.6%-8.4%. The article also notes that according to Adobo, we’ve fallen out of the top 10 for most expensive cities in the country to rent. Frankly, that’s a ranking chart I’m happy to fall off of. Despite those increases in rent, the highest and fastest growing rents in the area aren’t in Seattle. Bellevue has higher rent, while Tacoma and Kent both have higher increases in rent. The latter are likely an effect of people being priced out of Seattle. The former is just another reminder that Bellevue is the region’s sleeping giant for real estate prices.
In legislative news related to renting, the “Fair Chance Housing Ordinance,” unanimously passed the city council. Designed to help address the city’s homelessness problem by reducing barriers to renting, the ordinance limits how prior convictions and arrests can be used as part of a rental application. The ordinance has many exceptions for small landlords, and focuses primarily on crimes with low recidivism rates.