Rental rates on rise

Snohomish County apartment hunters, get ready to clean out your wallets.

Rents are ballooning in many cities, even surpassing increases in some areas of Seattle.

Lynnwood, South Everett, Edmonds and Mukilteo are leading the pack, with rents jumping by as much as almost 14 percent in the past year and reaching an average of almost $900 a month in some cities.

For people in need of affordable housing, that means a lot of searching and a fair amount of frustration.

"I haven't really seen anything out there," said Chris Timaeus, a 26-year-old Seattle resident trying to find an apartment in Mukilteo.

There are several reasons why the odds are currently stacked against people looking for cheap rents in Snohomish County.

First, the regional economy is doing well and unemployment — about 4 percent countywide — is low.

Big employers, including Boeing's Everett plant, are adding jobs, allowing residents who may have been sharing a place to move out on their own, said Tom Cain, whose company, Cain Inc., surveys Snohomish and King county apartments quarterly.

That means there are more people to compete against for that golden place: the one with the great landlord and the low rent.

What's also making the hunt challenging is the lack of apartments available across Snohomish County, where the average vacancy rate is 4 percent.

Developers aren't building new apartments, and some are turning existing units into condos for sale, said Cain.

"We don't have as many properties up here, and that's why rents are increasing more," he said.

As a result, the county has identified the lack of affordable rental housing as a significant problem and is looking at ways to ease the pain for residents, said Mike Manley, division manager for the county's Office of Housing, Homelessness and Community Development.

Unfortunately, said Manley, the county doesn't have the money to subsidize large swaths of housing for residents and wipe out the problem.

"The long-term solution is going to have to involve some kind of public/private partnership," said Manley.

Timaeus, who lives in Seattle's Belltown area, moved to Mukilteo when he first arrived in the state a couple of years ago and had no problem finding an inexpensive apartment.

So when he recently decided to move back — in part because of what he says is ongoing violence in downtown Seattle — he was surprised to find the cost of renting had jumped.

"It's about two or three hundred dollars more for the same apartment," he said.

Several years ago, though, it was another story.

Rents across Snohomish County were flat or, in some cities, declining, said Shawn Hoban, president of Coast Real Estate, which manages about 50 properties in the county.

In early 2003, Snohomish County's rental-unit vacancy rate was 9 percent, and a record 70 percent of landlords across the Puget Sound region were offering move-in specials to fill their units, according to an industry vacancy report released at the time.

"If you look at what's happened in this market since the turn of the century, landlords were in a lot of cases subsidizing rents for residents for a long time," said Hoban.

Kirsten Orsini-Meinhard: 425-745-7804 or kmeinhard@seattletimes.com