Apartment List: January Year-Over-Year rents up nearly 23% in Seattle, 9.4% in Portland

Apartment List reports that rents are up nationwide by a record-setting 18% YoY, but growth has slowed.

Over the past 12 months, rent prices spiked by an unprecedented 17.8 percent nationally. The early stages of the pandemic led to a modest decline in rents from January 2020 through January 2021 (-1.4%), but the staggering growth of 2021 more than made up for the lost ground. In fact, the national median rent ($1,312) is now $120 greater than where we project it would have been if rent growth since the start of the pandemic had been in line with the average growth rates we saw in 2018 and 2019. Rent growth over the past year has far outpaced that of any prior year in our estimates, which go back to 2017. For comparison, year-over-year rent growth in January averaged just 2.3 percent in the three years preceding the pandemic. 

While Portland rents are up 9.4%, rents throughout Oregon rose an average of 12.8%. In Seattle, rents jumped about 23% while Washington State rents increased an average of 19.8%, according to the data service.

Apartment List explains its methodology in detail here.