I’m not going to write much, just link to a recent study of rents nationwide by Apartment List, a paragraph and two images.

Here’s the paragraph:

City rankings change substantially from year to year. From 2017 to 2018, Seattle experienced the largest drop in the rankings, after experiencing rent growth above 5 percent for each year from 2015 to 2017. In fact, in 2017, Seattle had the fastest rent growth of the nation’s 25 largest cities at 5.2 percent. In the year ending June 1, 2018, however, Seattle saw its rank fall to #22, with rents decreasing by 0.9 percent. Seattle has seen a record number of new units hit the market over the past couple of years, and it seems that all this new supply has now put a halt to the city’s rent growth. Interestingly, while Seattle’s rent growth has dropped off, the city’s for-sale inventory is still tightly constrained, and the city’s home prices are the fastest-growing in the nation. Similar slowdowns can be seen in Portland and Denver, both of which have also added substantial amounts of new rental housing.

And this picture:

And this picture:

Maybe I’ll write more later but right now, as they say, I’m just shaking my head.