Apartment List: Spokane rents drop in September, breaking 9-month streak of monthly increases

After nearly a year of rapidly increasing rents, it appears Spokane’s rental market may be cooling off.

Spokane metro area rents dropped 1.8% in September compared with August, snapping a nine-month streak of monthly rate increases, according to rental listing site Apartment List.

The Lilac City was among just three cities nationwide that experienced a decline in month-over-month rents in September. Boise and Corpus Christi, Texas were the other two cities, Apartment List reported.

“Rents are still increasing in nearly all of the nation’s 100 largest cities, but with Boise and Spokane marking notable exceptions where rents dipped this month,” Apartment List said in a rent report published in September. “These markets have seen some of the nation’s fastest growing rents over the past year, but it appears that they may have hit their peaks.”

Median rents in Spokane in September were $991 for a one-bedroom apartment and $1,362 for a two-bedroom unit.

The national median rent last month for all unit types last month was $1,302, Apartment List reported.

Spokane’s rent decline in September was the city’s greatest month-over-month drop since Apartment List began recording data in 2017. The last time Spokane’s rents dropped was in November 2020 with a 0.1% decrease.

Apartment List Senior Economist Chris Salviati said rent drops in Boise and Spokane may signal there is a limit to the frenzied demand that’s been occurring in the two cities during the pandemic.

However, it’s difficult to determine whether a long-term cooldown will persist in Spokane’s rental market, he said.

“It’s hard to say if it’s an inflection point where things start to come down a little bit or a temporary reprieve from an upward trajectory,” he said.

Spokane’s rising rents have been accelerated, in part, by the pandemic and remote workers seeking more space and affordability found in midsized cities – especially those close to larger West Coast metros, such as Seattle, San Francisco and Portland.

Rents in Spokane have escalated 29.2% compared with September 2020, marking the fourth-fastest year-over-year increase among the nation’s 100 cities.

Remote and hybrid work will be a trend to watch in relation to rental market demand, Salviati said.

Apartment List’s website user data indicated a nationwide uptick in people searching forsix-month lease terms compared to a typical 12-month lease, Salviati said.

“What that tells us is we are still seeing a heightened level of uncertainty in the rental market right now,” he said.

People who are working remotely may be deciding to relocate to another city, but want to remain flexible if their workplace requires them to go back to the office in the future, Salviati said.

“This is something that’s all so new,” he said, referring to nationwide rental market dynamics. “We will have to see how things settle down when we are in a world where the virus isn’t dictating these situations.”

Nationally, rents are continuing to grow at an unprecedented rate and increased 2.1% in September, according to Apartment List.

A bright spot is that apartment vacancy rates rose slightly in September. Apartment List’s apartment vacancy index declined to about 4%, which is lower than the 6% rate that was typical before the pandemic.

Spokane had a 0.5% apartment vacancy rate for all unit types in Spring 2021, according to an apartment market survey by the Washington Center for Real Estate Research. Fall data has not yet been released.