Published September
2002
Apartment
vacancy rate
hits 10-year high
By
Bryan Corliss
Herald Business Writer
The number of empty
apartments has doubled in Snohomish County over the past year, and now
is at a 10-year high, industry watchers say.
Rents have stopped
climbing and construction of new apartments and condominiums has come
to a screeching halt, the observers said.
The outlook is for
“zero-percent growth” for the next year or so, and it’s likely that rents
will fall 4 or 5 percent during that period, said Mike Dupre, a principal
in Dupre+Scott.
Tom Hoban at Coast
Management agreed.
“We’re telling our
clients to expect the rest of this calendar year to be flat on rents and
about where we’re at now with occupancy rates,” he said. There’s been
little cause for optimism in 2002.
Apartment vacancy
rates countywide jumped from 4.7 percent in July 2001 to 9.2 percent in
June, according to a recent report from Property Dynamics, a Woodinville
firm that tracks the rental market.
In the south Everett/Paine
Field/Mukilteo area, which is home to almost a third of all apartments
countywide, vacancy rates hit 10.8 percent in June, the report said. That’s
up from 5.7 percent last summer, and 7.2 percent in December.
In Mountlake Terrace,
vacancy rates more than doubled over the past year, jumping from 4.4 to
9.5 percent. Edmonds landlords also saw their vacancies more than double,
with rates going from 3.7 to 8.1 percent, according to the report.
Dupre’s most recent
survey was in April. At that point, the county’s vacancy rate was 8.6
percent. But even that was the “highest rate we’ve seen in a long time,
certainly in the past decade,” he said.
Rents dipped slightly
over the winter, Dupre said, falling from an average of $799 in October
to $793 — the first decline in years.
The causes of the
market slump are no mystery. “It’s the tech wreck and the recent Boeing
layoffs and the general softening of the economy,” Hoban said.
There are some veins
of silver lining the storm clouds, according to Hoban.
One is the nature
of the people who are loosing jobs. Tech and aerospace workers aren’t
as transient as, say, construction workers, who will pack up their pink
slips and move more readily, Hoban said. Instead, those laid off so far
this year are staying in their apartments and looking for other jobs.
And the other piece
of good news is that, this time, there isn’t a glut of new apartments
on the market.
Credit all the growth
management restrictions that slowed the construction of new apartments
during the recent boom years, he said.
Only one new apartment
project has received building permits in Snohomish County so far this
year, a 284-unit complex planned for Mill Creek. By comparison, almost
1,600 new multi-family units got permits last year.
Back
to the top/September
2002 Main Menu