Mike Scott will present a 70 minute apartment market and investment update at the annual Rental Housing Association of Puget Sound's Spring Workshop on March 20th at Maplewood Greens in Renton.

We thank the professional property managers and property owners who contributed information for our annual study of line-item apartment expenses for apartment properties in the Puget Sound region, which is published in The Apartment Expense Report. Thanks to their support of the apartment investment industry and their commitment to this research, we are able to provide the industry with a detailed analysis of line item operating costs based on our audit of 973 detailed line-item operating statements for 108,446 apartment units. We would also like to thank all of the other professional property managers, owners, and owner representatives who participated in this year's research.

When you get right down to it, things are pretty much black or white when it comes to a discussion of apartment revenue and expenses. Your whole year’s work boils down to just one of two results, profit or loss. So it’s important to shoot for the best possible result. We just published our annual Apartment Expense Report, which shows, not surprisingly, that expenses climbed again last year. Some costs rose more than others though. But before you get too depressed, consider this: No matter how high your expenses are, they are probably a drop in the bucket compared to what it must cost to maintain Ashford Castle in County Mayo Ireland, pictured here.

Recent news makes it clear that whether you buy Swedish meatballs from a large company or sausage from your local butcher, like these from Eby's Home Cured Meats in Chambersburg Pennsylvania (made only with pork - for horse lovers), it is important to know what goes into the package.

We are updating our online Apartment Development Report almost daily right now. as a result of all the changes we're seeing, we realizing that apartment development activity these days is just like making sausage. In the past week or so we've updated information for about 250 projects in the Puget Sound region. That's just over two-thirds of all the active, proposed, and on-hold development projects we currently track. So here is a preliminary look at the ingredients in this sausage.

With the Oscars coming up in a couple of days we decided it’s about time to give some awards to some key apartment investment trends. We zeroed in on five interesting trends we found from all the 5-unit and larger sales in King, Pierce, and Snohomish counties.

Capitalization rates on apartment purchases in the Seattle metro area have been falling for so long that we started worrying what would happen to investors' yields if rates start climbing. After all, the low rates today are not the norm. A dozen years ago investors were able to buy apartments at a 7% capitalization rate (cap rate). Going back even further, cap rates were higher than that.