Why it is so hard to find, afford renting a Seattle single-family home

Tracy Cambron couldn't afford to buy a house in Seattle when she moved here a decade ago. Still, she wanted to give her two kids a childhood like hers - one where they could play in a yard, trick-or-treat at neighbors' houses and pass a football in the street.

She rented single-family homes in Seattle neighborhoods to give them that experience. But challenges mounted. She was upended by landlords selling the houses she rented, struggled with scarce options and frequently spent over half her income on sky-high rents.

After her youngest left for college and Cambron was laid off, she knew she couldn't pay upward of $4,000 a month to rent a house anymore and moved out last fall. The 58-year-old empty-nester has since tried and failed to find a more affordable single-family rental. She's now living on a boat while she figures out her next steps.

It's just been quite shocking to me, the whole dislocation," she said. "People still want to put down roots. I wish there were more options available."

Like Cambron, renters who want to live in single-family neighborhoods say finding - and paying for - a rental house feels increasingly out of reach.

House rents have risen nearly twice as fast as multifamily rents in Seattle over the past decade, a byproduct of dwindling single-family home rentals.

Seattle's shortage, part of a nationwide trend, has become a flashpoint in the city, fueling debate among landlords, tenant advocates and elected officials over the reasons for the decline. Some point to the city's strengthened renter protections, especially during the pandemic, while others blame economic factors.

The city saw an 11% decline in its stock of houses for rent between 2014 and 2024, dropping from nearly 25,350 to 22,450, according to census data. The city lost a significant amount of its rental houses, around one-fifth, between 2019 and 2022.

"Frankly, the combination of factors (during the pandemic) was so extensive that I'm almost surprised that the number of active single-family rentals didn't decline more," said Windermere principal economist Jeff Tucker.

As rising home prices make new rentals less financially feasible, Seattle could be at risk of losing more of them over the long term, Tucker said.

A shortage of single-family rentals in Seattle "means fewer people have the opportunity to have a house of their own with a yard if they can't, for whatever reason, have a mortgage," he said. "I think that is inequitable."

Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson said the city faces an uphill battle reversing the decline, as economic forces continue to push the sector downward. The only solution, she believes, is supplementing the loss with more family-sized apartments and alternative housing types.

"The levers that we have at our disposal to try to prevent the loss of single-family home rentals - there's not a lot that I can see that we can do," she said.

‘Very substantial risk'

Many of Seattle's landlords believe wholeheartedly that strengthened renter protections are the driving force behind the city's loss of single-family rentals.

Scott Barnhart, 74, and his wife rented out and managed a three-bedroom house in Wallingford for 35 years. But as new landlord-tenant regulations piled up, they felt more vulnerable to financial misfortune from getting stuck with a bad tenant, Barnhart said. The couple decided to sell the home last fall.

"The rules were constantly changing," he said. "It's very clear from the city of Seattle that you are assuming a large responsibility and a very substantial risk."

Between 2014 and 2017, the city adopted a slew of regulations to discourage housing discrimination, thereby lessening landlords' power to choose their tenants.

Then, to prevent homelessness during the pandemic, the state paused evictions for nonpayment of rent. That left some single-family landlords without rental income for months - and made others uneasy.

Before the state's temporary eviction restrictions ended in 2021, the state and the city of Seattle adopted permanent changes that continue to make evictions challenging for landlords.

The state allowed low-income tenants free attorneys to represent them in eviction cases, which can make the eviction process longer, and therefore more financially burdensome for landlords. Meanwhile, Seattle restricted evictions of families with children during the school year and evictions of low-income tenants during the winter months.

"It used to be pretty straightforward. Now, it's fraught with land mines. And one misstep can cost you tens of thousands of dollars," said Sean Flynn, president of the Rental Housing Association of Washington. "When the regulatory environment becomes too onerous, and there's too much risk, homeowners say, ‘Why am I doing this?' "

Studies on the issue have produced mixed results.

University of Washington researchers found that, at least a decade ago, new tenant regulations didn't cause a wave of small rental property sales. Those regulations included a 2016 ordinance requiring landlords to accept the first qualified applicant who completes an application and a 2017 ordinance generally banning landlords from denying applicants based on their criminal history.

However, a report by the city auditor's office noted a spike in sales of single-unit rental properties registered with the city around the time of pandemic-era renter protections.

Sales of registered single units, which include short-term rentals and condos in addition to long-term single-family rental houses, rose from 517 in 2019 to 1,308 in 2021 - a 153% increase - before falling back down.

High demand and low mortgage rates during those years caused house prices to spike, providing owners a lucrative exit from the rental market, Windermere's Tucker said. But the increase in Seattle's overall single-family home sales was much smaller at 21%, according to the Northwest Multiple Listing Service.

The jump in rental sales during the pandemic is "substantially more than would be explained by the increase in sales activity here, so that does strike me," Tucker said. "I do think there's truth to landlords' claims that the costs and risks of owning a single-family rental home climbed during that time. The net benefit of selling and walking away went up."

Flynn said he's worried single-family rental homes in Seattle will become "endangered" if more leave the market faster than they can be replaced.

He pointed to a nationwide economic shift of people buying rentals with the intent of calling them home, because keeping them as rentals wouldn't make financial sense.

People "cannot buy these homes and rent them out," he said. "You'd be bleeding thousands of dollars a month just in mortgage costs."

Economic forces

While landlords faced stronger incentives to sell rental properties, rising homeownership costs and mortgage rates have discouraged the creation of new rentals.

Over the years, the gap between single-family home payments and their rents has widened.

In 2019, the typical monthly house payment in Seattle averaged close to $2,600 while single-family home rents averaged nearly $2,300 - a $300 difference, according to Zillow data. But in 2025, the city's typical payment for a house averaged around $4,700, while single-family home rents averaged almost $3,200 - a $1,500 difference.

"The market conditions don't support … the intention of making them rentals," said real estate economist Michael Wilkerson with ECONorthwest.

Additionally, fewer people are downsizing as they age, which has previously provided a flow of single-family homes into Seattle's rental market.

It was once common for older people to move into a smaller home and rent out their old house as income, Wilkerson said. But now, those looking to downsize face much higher costs than in decades past, discouraging them from moving or forcing them to sell their existing homes for a down payment instead of keeping them as rentals.

The median single-family home price in King County has doubled over the last 10 years, according to Northwest Multiple Listing Service historical data.

The city hasn't seen an influx of cash-flush investors who could bypass those financial challenges by purchasing homes outright and renting them. The Seattle area's share of homes purchased by institutional investors has consistently remained one of the lowest in the nation, declining slightly last year to 5.4%, according to the real estate data company ATTOM.

A sluggish housing market might provide some short-term relief, however. Zillow economist Kara Ng said homeowners who need to move are renting out their homes rather than selling at a loss, she said, possibly contributing to a slight year-over-year increase in single-family home rentals in Seattle in 2024.

These "accidental landlords" could keep the single-family rental market propped up as more landlords sell and fewer intentionally buy for the purposes of renting, Tucker said.

But the trend may only last as long as the market stays sluggish, he said. If conditions shift and the gap between rents and mortgage payments widens further, Seattle could continue to lose single-family rental homes - though not as quickly as during the pandemic.

Extremely low mortgage rates and the eviction moratorium likely made those years an anomaly, Tucker said.

Lack of family-sized rentals

The scarcity of single-family rentals has led to significantly higher average rents than apartments, according to Zillow data, limiting access to mostly high earners.

A quick scroll through Zillow shows that many single-family rentals range between $3,000 and upward of $4,000 a month.

That's been especially painful for Seattle's low-income tenants who rely on housing vouchers, government subsidies that help low-income tenants pay rent. The limits of these vouchers often fall short of covering Seattle's single-family rentals.

More than half of voucher households have children, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. But just about a quarter of the nation's voucher holders live in single-family rental homes.

"They would love to live in single-family homes, especially with children, but they have to live in multifamily," said Terri Anderson, statewide policy director for the Tenant's Union of Washington.

Finding an apartment with more than two bedrooms isn't easy either in Seattle.

New multifamily construction has boomed due to irresistibly low interest rates during the pandemic. But studios, one-bedroom and two-bedroom units mostly fill those projects.

The city's number of housing units with three or more bedrooms has fallen 1% since 2019, while units with two or fewer bedrooms have risen by 18%, according to census data. That's a problem for Seattle's growing number of renters over 35.

"You're more likely to have a family," said Zillow's Ng. "The typical renter is getting older and needs more space."

Mayor Wilson has been a vocal critic of the notion that increased renter protections are driving out single-family rentals.

"I'm not saying that the landlord-tenant law regulatory environment is not a factor, but it's not a driving factor," she said in an interview this month. "What we would lose by weakening our tenant protections would outweigh what we could reasonably expect to gain in terms of retaining single-family rentals."

The driving factors, in Wilson's view, are the macroeconomics such as mortgage rates and home prices, which she can't really change.

The city, under past mayors, has been working to incentivize developers and homeowners to build different types of family-sized rental housing. Zoning changes have allowed for accessory dwelling units and attached homes in single-family neighborhoods.

But developers face a similarly challenging economic environment as homebuyers. Amid high construction costs and interest rates, construction permits are falling as projects become harder to pencil out, and smaller units offer more profit than larger ones.

Wilson said the city needs to explore more incentives for building family-sized multifamily units that can outweigh those cost pressures.

‘It kind of feels like a pipe dream now'

Even if Seattle figures out a way to produce larger multifamily housing units, that still means a future in which Seattle renters are increasingly locked out of single-family houses.

"A world without many single-family rentals will mean that fewer renters have any way of living in those neighborhoods, except at the edges, Tucker said.

Single-family homes, although out of reach for many to buy, offer benefits that apartment living can't, said Scott Shapiro, who rents a home in Queen Anne.

Like Cambron, the renter who now lives in a boat, Shapiro wants to give his two children the experience of living in a house with a yard in a quiet neighborhood. The 56-year-old, who previously rented a two-bedroom Belltown condo, said he chose to rent a house in 2018 because he thought it would give his children access to better schools and a quieter lifestyle.

The condo "wasn't big enough," he said. "I wanted them to be around their friends and walk to school and (feel) the safety of being in a neighborhood."

That's an experience that shouldn't be limited to homebuyers, Cambron said. She wants to see more renters in single-family neighborhoods, like the one her family once lived in.

Before she had to leave her rental house, she watched neighbors across the street move out after being priced out of their rental. It felt like a warning of a future where renters no longer had access to Seattle's single-family homes, she said.

"A lot of Americans are still told that the American dream consists of a yard and a house," she said. "It kind of feels like a pipe dream now."

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