The buyers who move first are already moving. Here’s what they see that the sidelines don’t.

Jerrid Anderson | Simon | Anderson Multifamily Team | Kidder Mathews

Let’s start with what’s happening on our desk.
We have 67 listings and pending transactions.

Since January 2026 we’ve averaged 10 offers and 3.5 mutual transactions per month.

Four weeks into July, and we’re at 34 offers, 10 mutual transactions and 5 more being actively negotiated. That’s roughly 4x of our trailing six-month average offer and mutual transaction pace.

Nothing changed in July. No rate cut, no headline, no policy win. What changed is that a specific group of buyers stopped waiting. They’re buying at the lowest price per unit Seattle has seen in over a decade, into a development pipeline that has effectively stopped.

1. The supply cliff is real, and it will be followed by a supply drought with a 3 year delay to get development ramped back up.

Everyone spent four years worried about oversupply of new apartments. That story is over. The huge delivery pipeline has been absorbed.

New permit applications have collapsed. Seattle’s peak was 17,300 units of new housing permits applied for in 2020. Second-quarter 2026 figures show 491 units, a 97% decline from peak.

Issue permits followed. 2025 issued permits came in 66% below the 2021 peak, and 2026 is on pace for half of that.

Deliveries are about to fall off the same cliff, there is about a 3 year delay from permit issuance to construction completion, meaning with record deliveries in 2024, 2027 is the year the supply cliff comes into view and then the drought comes.

The pipeline math is the part most people miss. Apartments take three to five years to go from application to lease-up. The application drought of 2024–2026 becomes the delivery drought of 2028–2030. Whatever gets delivered between now and then is already in the ground. There is no mechanism left to add supply on that horizon.

The Housing Development Consortium called it plainly: Seattle is in a housing production freeze, and because housing takes years to move from permit to occupancy, we are only beginning to feel it. University of Washington’s Gregg Colburn has been more direct, the visible shortage arrives in 2028 or 2029.

And the city just made it worse. The MHA fee relief that developers argued could unlock 125 stalled projects and 12,000 units was shelved. On top of that, Seattle raised permit fees 18% for 2026, precisely because permit volume collapsed and the permitting department needs revenue. Fewer projects, higher fees, fewer projects. Don’t expect that loop to break anytime soon.

If you own apartments in Seattle, the city’s housing policy is now working directly in your favor. That is not what anyone wants, but it’s coming to fruition.

2. Rents are flat, but the setup underneath them has completely changed
Flat rents are why pricing is where it is. They’re also why the entry point is attractive.

Sub-50 unit properties: rents are up 7% since 2020, about 1.2% annually. Vacancy has declined from 6.9% to 5.9%.

50+ unit properties: rents are up roughly 1.9% per year since 2020. Vacancy at 8.1%, down from an 11.4% pandemic peak.

Seattle absorbed 18,100 units over three years, all brand-new product that should command premium rents and vacancy still went down with overall average rents remaining flat. Demand didn’t just hold. It ate the largest supply wave in Seattle’s history proven by the net decline in vacancy since the record number units were delivered.

That is the whole argument. You had a once-in-a-generation flood of new inventory suppressing rents, and it’s gone.

Owners are feeling it before the data shows it. In our conversations this year, several have reported turnover falling sharply. One told us that a year ago over half of his residents up for renewal moved out; today it’s 30%. Seventy percent retention means residents have stopped chasing lease-up concessions across the street because those concessions are burning off.

3. The demand story is stronger than the headlines
Let’s be honest about the bad news first, because you’ve heard it and it’s real.

The Seattle area lost 12,900 jobs in 2025, the first annual decline since 2009. Amazon employs about 49,000 people in Seattle, down from a 60,000 peak. Office vacancy in the Seattle CBD is in the mid 30%.

That’s exactly why you can buy at 2014 pricing. Yes, apartment price per unit and square foot is hovering between 2014 and 2015 levels. You don’t get a discount and a clean narrative at the same time. You have to pick one.

But the narrative is turning, and it’s turning quietly:

• Anthropic signed 113,000 SF at Dexter Yard in South Lake Union.
• Providence Health & Services took roughly 260,000 SF at the former Boeing Longacres campus in Renton, the region’s largest new office lease of 2026.
• Apple took roughly 193,000 SF at Arbor Blocks West in South Lake Union in 2025.
• Meta signed nearly 145,000 SF at Willow Creek in Redmond.
• Salesforce renewed Tableau’s 114,000 SF Fremont campus in July, the largest Seattle renewal of the year, and Nvidia took 28,000 SF nearby.
• Anduril is rebuilding the shuttered Foss Shipyard on the Ship Canal, tens of millions invested as the U.S. hub for a new class of autonomous naval vessels with HD Hyundai, alongside 40,000 SF in Bellevue’s Skyline Tower and 100+ open Seattle roles for its connected warfare headquarters. Barely covered locally.
• Brinc Drones opened a headquarters and factory at West Canal Yards, a former cannery a few blocks from Foss.

Notice the pattern. Amazon is consolidating. Everyone else is arriving. And two of the fastest-growing employers on that list build physical hardware on the Ship Canal, those are wage jobs whose workers rent in Ballard, Fremont, Interbay, and Queen Anne, not remote roles that could sit anywhere.

We’re also watching a familiar pattern play out in the West Coast tech hub to the South. In 2024, the NMHC consensus was that San Francisco was uninvestable. In 2026, the same groups of apartment investors and developers say they missed it and it’s expensive now. Seattle has historically trailed Bay Area cycles by 12 to 24 months. We are sitting in that window.

The honest rub

Cash flow is hard right now. Debt costs what it costs. If you need day-one yield, this market will frustrate you.

But that’s the trade. You’re not being paid to buy stabilized income today. You’re being paid to buy basis ahead of a supply shortage that is already mathematically locked in for 2028 through 2030. When rates ease or rents move and only one of those needs to happen, the pricing you can get today does not come back.

Buffett’s version of this: You have to make bets, not predictions. Predicting rain doesn’t count. Building arks does.

Seattle spent four years absorbing the biggest supply wave in its history while rents stayed flat and vacancy quietly fell. The supply is gone. The pipeline is empty through the end of the decade. The employers arriving are real and they’re building physical things here.

The buyers who understand this aren’t waiting for confirmation. That’s what our July looks like.

If you want to see what’s actually selling, and what’s about to, call me.

Jerrid Anderson, Simon | Anderson Multifamily Team, Kidder Mathews

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Sources: Kidder Mathews Q1/Q2 2026 Seattle & Puget Sound Apartment Market Dynamics; City of Seattle SDCI permit data via KING 5; Housing Development Consortium; Seattle Housing Roundtable; The Urbanist; The Registry; GeekWire; Seattle Times; CoStar. Transaction data from Simon | Anderson Multifamily Team, January–July 2026.