Seattle Bubble • Are Seattle-Area Rents Poised to Shoot Up Again?
As I have pointed out numerous times before, the interesting thing about rent is that you can’t take out exotic financing to pay it, so over the long run, rents and incomes tend to track pretty darn close to each other, as can be seen from 1990 through 2003. In the aftermath of the housing bust, it seems like rents have already shot up more than local incomes would support, probably due to the factors I mentioned above.
From what I can tell by looking at the available data, rents are highly unlikely to “climb 29%” over the next four years unless we see a sudden sharp increase in incomes. If anything, rents seems poised to fallover the next few years to get back in line with incomes.
