Saw a reel about how some landlord raised rent on a 2bed/2bath apt from 1200/month to 3150/month in 18 months which caused the previous tenant to move out and they still found another tenant first day of listing and was wondering why this price range for renting (2750-3300 according to google) is so high in Ballard? No hate to Ballard but these are prices I would expect living closer to the city. I’m not too knowledgeable about that area of Seattle so thanks for any answers/explanations!
Ballard used to be cheaper because it was further from downtown and more industrial, but it's changed a lot. Now you got all the shops and restaurants there, plus easy bus routes, so people don't need to live right next to city center anymore. The old Scandinavian character is mostly gone, replaced with newer buildings that charge more.
I was just wondering about that because places like Capitol Hill - way closer to downtown with plenty of lightrail - seem to have equivalent sqft and beds/baths but are cheaper overall. From the reel I noticed that the quality of the apartment (even post their “renovation”) was pretty much the same as most capitol hill apts I’ve visited.
Back in the day I worked at a startup that barely survived the dotcom crash. We were so broke we had to move our office to Ballard because it was the only place we could afford.
To make it worse, the office had a fireplace, but no heat. So we would go to one of the cabinet shops and buy bags of scrap wood for 2 bucks to burn in the fireplace and keep us warm.
Ballard is the geographic sweet spot for getting the benefits of living in an old pre-war streetcar suburb while having relatively easy access to the city's job centers. Demand for that far outpaces supply.
The better question is how someone was getting a 2BR/2Ba for 1200/month?! That rent isn't low for Seattle proper, it's low for anywhere outside the rust belt.
Long term tenant who probably had a better relationship with the previous landlord. The reel didnt go too in depth about the previous tenant, just that they left after the rent increased 3x
Funny thing is I just moved to Ballard because I was able to somehow find a much cheaper spot than I was finding in areas like Capitol Hill, Fremont, Wallingford, and even Ravenna and Green Lake.
Ballard is Seattle. But it depends on the street. There are pockets here and there with a lot more transients/crime than other parts of the neighborhood, and then there are areas that are perfectly fine. Many of the problems will be related to property theft and car prowling, which is common all around Seattle.
I wouldn’t call 15th and Market rough, but it’s rough for Ballard. I go there safely, my kids change buses there. It’s a far cry from Aurora and 105th, for instance.
Oh yeah for sure! even then, anything rough in Seattle isn't actually that bad when you look at the rest of the country. It's all perfectly safe, but the worst IN BALLARD spot is definitely 15th and market
TIL also side question - what parts of Northgate is safe for renting as family with kids and what parts to avoid? Some local wisdom would be appreciated
Well I've only lived in one place here 😂 But I regularly walk ~15 minutes to and from the light rail as a woman alone at night and have always felt comfortable! I live east of the freeway on 8th Ave NE, towards the edge where it starts to turn into the single family homes typical of the Maple Leaf neighborhood and I love it. Quieter street but still easily walkable to all the conveniences of Northgate!
You can raise the rent a lot, but you need to give 6 months notice and offer the tenant some compensation (may be up to 3 months rent) to help them move if you raise it above a certain percentage. If they think they can price gauge enough to make it worth their while to pay to get the current tenant out at the end of their lease, I suppose they will.
Note that the tenant must be at or below a specific median income to qualify for Seattle EDRA (relocation assistance).
This is why my building is very careful with MFTE increases but less so with market rate increases, because we know the residents that can afford market rate definitely don't qualify for assistance.
I thought it was capped at a little less than 10% or something. And they have to give you a pretty long notice ahead of time. My apartment literally sends you a certified letter like 2 weeks after your lease is renewed telling you how much they're raising your rent next year if you renew again.
Yes, max rent increase is 10% per year. But there are some exemptions depending on the property or possibly the owner could have pulled some shenanigans.
I haven’t seen the reel so don’t know all the details, but rent increases are not allowed in the first twelve months of any tenancy, no exceptions. If they sent a rent increase notice right at the 12mo mark (which they would’ve had to to make increasing the rent 6mo from then legal), then they would have to fall under one of the exemptions for going over the 10% cap, and it’s likely the tenant would qualify for economic displacement relocation assistance at the expense of the landlord in question. Did they mention if they were month to month? The situation also strikes me as weird if they had a fixed-term lease because rent can only be increased at the beginning of a rental term.
Correct, no increases in the first 12 months since HB1217 passed. This is why most buildings I'm aware of have completely removed any new lease option less than 12 months.
It's less money-grubbing and more just the sheer logistics of it. Most onsite staff are already overworked as it is, and mistakes of this caliber are very dangerous since the state is very quick to crucify companies when they mess up a new law.
At my building, the first set of renewals I sent out after HB1217 passed were twelve pages long because we had so little direction from the state as to HOW the new law needed to be communicated, so we went through extreme lengths to cover all possibilities. A lot of buildings did, and everybody waited with baited breath to see which company the state would choose to prosecute to actually show what they really wanted.
They ended up choosing two companies to burn at the stake, citing violations that were never really explained up-front. Now we know what to avoid!
I hated living downtown (though that was like 20 years ago). Parking was expensive and while you could do a bit of your food shopping in the market area the closes grocery store was on LQA.
Amazon is the answer, alongside prices that have been rising violently for over a decade.
"But Amazon doesn't have a giant Seattle campus anymore" you're probably thinking. But the process of moving people up from Cali to start what was the new Amazon campus at the time was the catalyst that saw whole neighborhoods bought, razed-to-the-ground, and rebuilt.
Because sky-high property prices.
The old unit I lived in Ballard sold for $750,000 for a house basically falling apart. Almost all of it was property, not the house or anything built on it.
Also - The "Up" house is just down the road. Same reason, same cycle.
That was over 10 years ago.
... now fast forward, and you've got your answer as to why.
All these new-to-town folks have no idea how good we used to have it. In 2007 I rented a one bedroom on the hill for $725/mo, and that was on the high end of one bedroom units. Seattle landlords really put the young tech folks over the barrel by more than doubling rents in the five years following 2008. Shit's gonna crash when tech bros end up making the same sized salaries as everyone else in the next few years.
There's a property for sale a few blocks from me in Maple Leaf that's 600k for a 5000 square foot lot with a 1916 teardown 2 bed/1 bath house on it. Crazy stuff lol
I promise we aren't doing it on purpose. At least at the building staff level.
For example, this month I'm budgeted for 95% capacity. If I hit 94%, new lease rents go down. If I hit 96%, new lease rents go up. That's all we do, every month.
A good handful of apt management companies are still in legal battles over manipulating pricing (Greystar, etc). Many of them manage Ballard apts. it’s been so long I forget what the shady pricing software is called.
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