Apartment Units Fill Fastest in Seattle

"The Seattle area is filling up new apartments faster than any region in the country, suggesting demand for housing is starting to catch up with the record construction boom," reports Mike Rosenberg. The news is "not a great sign for tenants hoping landlords get desperate and drop rents," adds Rosenberg.

Specifically, 10,000 extra apartments units got tenants in the 12-month period ending in March. In the first three months of this year, Greater Seattle filled about 3,400 new apartment units, more than any other city in the country (not even New York City could keep up).

The data from real-estate data firm RealPage reveals the next chapter in the narrative of simultaneous building and population booms in Seattle.

The new figures offer fresh insight into the years-long, multibillion-dollar experiment being waged by developers as they build more apartments in the city of Seattle this decade than in the previous half-century combined, betting on the long-term economic health of the region. Will enough renters eventually materialize to fill them, or will the city have a skyline of empty ghost apartments?

For while it looked like perhaps Seattle developers had built beyond the demand for housing in the region, but now housing is filling up as quickly as it can be built, according to Rosenberg.