Last year was a good year for apartment sales in the Puget Sound region. In fact, with $2.6 billion of property changing hands, it was the third best year ever. So let's see how active investors are this year by comparing the first four months of 2012 sales activity with the same period this year. That will tell us whether investors are still serious about this market, or just horsing around.

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Prices for apartments built in King County since the beginning of 2000 rose rapidly through 2007. Then they fell during the recession. But the latest online update of our Apartment Investment Report shows that it took until this year for prices to regain lost ground and set new highs. How did that happen? What can we expect next?

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We usually talk about trends for 20-unit and larger apartments. But there are a lot more investors involved in smaller rental properties like single-family rentals, multiplexes, and 5 to 19 unit apartment buildings. The proof: Each spring we survey just over 2,100 20-unit and larger properties for our Apartment Vacancy Report and more than 5,000 smaller properties for our 1-19 Unit rent & Vacancy Report. So this week we will talk about some of the trends we found in King County from our smaller property survey, published last week.

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Patty and I enjoy the outdoors, especially remote locations in the mountains. No buildings, no people, just empty. Patagonia provides lots of opportunities to enjoy vacant space. That's a very good thing, in Patagonia. But in our day-to-day lives in the Puget Sound apartment market, vacant space isn't a good thing. Last week we looked at how unit size has a significant impact on the rate of rent growth. This week's video looks at how unit size influences vacancy rates.

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Remember the Pepsi Challenge commercials from the 1970s? Pepsi won because it was sweeter, or so the story goes. Apartment investors often ask us which is sweeter, apartments with fewer bedrooms or those with more. They want to know which unit types will perform best in a recession, and which will perform best overall. Well, let's take a look.

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It's tax time again. Income taxes are due Monday and real estate taxes are due in a couple of weeks. It's not a particularly fun way to close the week, but here's a discussion of real estate tax trends impacting apartment investors in the Puget Sound region. No, it's not a fun topic, but we wanted to prove Jack Nicholson wrong. You can handle the truth.

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Some investors have a mixed attitude about buying right now, but they are buying anyway. They complain about how high prices are and how low the capitalization rates are. They fear interest rates will increase and that will drive up cap rates. And they are concerned about all the new construction in our market. But in the next breath, they tell us that, in spite of these concerns, they still think apartments in the Seattle metro area make more sense than alternate investment options. So let’s take a look at how this year is unfolding.

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The market vacancy rate in the Puget Sound region is 3.8%. That’s the lowest it has been since 2007. It doesn’t get that low very often. In fact, it has been that low just three other times in the past 30 years. These are some of the findings of our survey of 20-unit and larger apartments in the Puget Sound region, published in the Apartment Vacancy Report. The survey ended on Friday, March 22nd. We proofed the data on Saturday and published the report online on Sunday. We survey the entire market and collect reliable information for 217,637 units in 2,147 properties. That’s 88% of the market.

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May 25, 2013

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