Renting a single family home in Seattle
My wife and I have rented one- or two bedroom high-rise apartments in the Capitol Hill, South Lake Union, and Belltown neighborhoods in Seattle for the last eight years.
After eighteen months of COVID lockdown enduring the downsides of urban apartment living (traffic, noise, crime, cost, crowds, little personal space) without being able to enjoy the upsides of proximity to work, dining, bars, friends, and walkability as much, we decided we wanted the change of pace and more space of a single family home in the suburbs.
My experience securing a rental house in the Spring of 2021 was way more difficult than I expected, so below is my attempt to share what I learned with anyone else that plans to rent in Seattle any time soon.
TL;DR
If you get bored and don’t read the rest, just take away the following:
- Don’t bother starting to search until you’re about 2 months from moving.
- You have a contact window of a few hours to be even be considered for awesome houses.
- Use all listing services you can find, get instantly notified of new listings, and act on them right away.
- Prefer loose search criteria on listing websites over strict. Owners don’t include everything as searchable attributes on their listings and you’ll miss houses that fit.
- Get a completed application in front of the owner ASAP. Seattle’s First In Time law forces owners to offer a house to people in the order they’ve provided a completed application.
- Have required application documentation prepared before you get serious. Don’t fumble around on your bank’s website downloading statements from months ago while someone else beats you in line for your dream house.
- Tour ASAP, in the morning if possible. Some owners don’t let you apply until you’ve toured, but not all. If so, ask for an application before you leave.
Finding a Single Family Home Is Much Harder Than Apartment Hunting
I (foolishly) expected the search for a single family home to require about the same amount of effort as renting apartments from apartment towers downtown from a large real estate company.
In the past, our process to find apartments had been:
- Tune search filters on one or two listing services to exactly what we wanted in the neighborhood we wanted.
- Select from a menu of apartments with move-in dates in the far future.
- Schedule an appointment with a single leasing agent who is available on-site most of the day to see a few different floor plans or units in a single visit. They’re selling to you.
- Repeat until signing a lease. In the four apartments we lived in, we never toured more than three times.
Finding a single-family home was much more difficult than finding an apartment in every way due to the sheer number of individuals you need to talk to, time-spent-per-unit-toured, the insane demand and low supply.
Our House Search Visualized
The below chart shows the number of listings we viewed, considered, how many we abandoned or were rejected by, and how we eventually secured a place.
Over 432 listings viewed, 57 seriously considered, 8 applications, 3 tours, and 1 accepted application
Sourcing Rental House Leads
Use All Available Listing Services
In contrast to hunting for a downtown high-rise apartment where Zillow is king, I ended up using over a dozen rental listing services and eight property management company sites before eventually finding a house.
Most houses are duplicated on several listing services. However, all the houses we eventually toured were sourced from different sites (Zillow, Trulia, Hotpads, Apartments.com), so it was worth while to us to broaden our search past the obvious big names.
Houses that showed up on several sites often show up on one service many hours before others. As I’ll mention a few times, getting your name in line as quickly as possible is really important, so the advantage of a getting notified of a house a few hours before others is meaningful.
My ranked favorite listing services are:
- Zillow
- Trulia
- Hotpads
- Apartments.com
- Rent.com
- PadMapper
- kw.com
- forrent.com
- Apartmentlist
- seattlerentals.com
- Showmojo
- kw.com
- Craigslist
Get Notified and Act Immediately On Matches
As I’ll mention a few times elsewhere in this post, getting a tour and application pretty much just comes down to getting on an owner’s radar before others do.
Most listing services have a “Saved Searches” feature which can automatically send you an email when a new listing comes online. Zillow, Hot Pads, and Trulia all had phone apps that would send push notifications.
Configure these to notify you immediately. On Zillow, it looks like this (Instant):
Then act on the notifications as soon as you get them. We dropped what we were doing as soon as we saw a perfect match more than five times to apply to a house and still didn’t even land a tour for it. Also set aside some time every morning and on Fridays, as that appears to be the hottest times for new listings:
Prefer Loose Over Strict Search Filters
Hyper-tuning search filters on listing services turned out to be a really bad move. I wasted frustrating calendar time thinking there were no fresh houses on the market that met our criteria only to find that I had been unnecessarily filtering many of them out.
Prefer loose over strict search filters to avoid missing incorrectly formatted house listings.
When an owner lists their house for rent, they almost always post a listing on many websites at the same time. The house we eventually rented was listed on five different sites. To make their lives easier, instead of entering criteria as searchable fields in the listing, it seems that owners will copy/paste a text blurb into each listing. Additionally, home types don’t appear to have a strict definition, and owners may use Townhouse and House interchangeably.
For example, we wanted to rent a 3+ bedroom house that allowed small dogs and had parking. That means our search filters for most services would look like:
Pets: Small dogs allowed
Bedrooms: 3+
Parking: On-site
Home Type: House
Move-In Date: 6/5
A listing could be:
Pets: ____
Bedrooms: 3
Parking: ____
Home Type: Townhouse
Description: For rent is a beautiful 3 bedroom single family house available in June. Pets allowed with additional deposit. Huge two-car garage.
Even though it might fit us perfectly, when searching on Zillow with our filters, the above house doesn’t show up! After I relaxed the filters I had saved, I had much better luck.
Look At Property Management Company Sites Too
In addition to big rental listing services, I found some success trawling property management company websites. It seems that some property managers will list properties a few hours (which turned out to be meaningful) before posting to the big names. I found these by Googling the names of companies that managed properties I was interested in.
Rental Real Estate Agents Refused To Help
After a few weeks of trying to find a house and only landing a single tour, I was discouraged and wanted some help finding a place. I reached out to rental real estate agencies to get a list of houses. Each of them replied that they weren’t offering the services at the time because houses were flying off the market so fast that they couldn’t even keep their internal lists up to date.
Be Persistent, Follow Up On Near-Misses; Be Assertive
On more than one occasion, we didn’t hear back from an owner for some time, only to get a positive response after following up again later.
After time went on, I also learned that we were much more likely to get a tour by calling the owner and scheduling over the phone. After one embarrassing exchange, I learned to save the owner’s name, address, description of the house and whatever I wanted to ask them as a phone contact if they called back later (“.. sorry, which house are you referring to?.. uhh I can’t remember what I wanted to know about it.”🤦).
Touring
Touring To Apply
As I’ll mention again below, at every step of the process you should be trying to get in line with a completed application as soon as possible. When you tour, ask the owner or property manager to send you an application while you’re physically present to avoid hours of wall time communicating.
Tour As Early As You Can
On one occasion, we missed out because a group had been able to tour (and thus get an application) in the morning a few hours before we were able to. Because they were able to tour first and thus apply first, they got the house and we didn’t.
Questions To Ask On A Tour
Before you tour, or while on your tour, make sure to ask:
- Does the owner use part of the property for storage? More than one house had this situation which we didn’t like.
- Did the previous tenants have cats/dogs/other allergens?
- How many others are in front of us in the application process? If there are more than five, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to sign a lease.
Applying
Applying to rent a house was just as nuanced as sourcing leads.
Reusable Applications and Seattle’s First In Time Law
Zillow and similar big listing services provide re-usable applications. Prospective tenants provide typical application information just once, a $30-or-so fee, then the listing company combines that with a credit and background screening. An owner gets an easy thumbs up or thumbs down. Tenants don’t have to fill out the same info over and over.
From the perspective of both an owner and renter, it seems pretty convenient at first glance.
In 2019, Seattle passed the First In Time law which requires owners to “…offer tenancy to the first qualified applicant who provides a completed application.” Combine this with re-usable applications, however, now as a tenant you have a huge incentive to lurk on Zillow and Apartments.com and slam Apply immediately when houses show up with no additional cost per application. It even felt automated in some cases based on how fast I saw a few listings go from 0 to 100 contacts.
On more than one occasion I would hear my email notification chirp, spend 10–30 minutes thinking about the house, neighborhood, etc, only to find that a dozen people had already applied within an hour of the house going up. Regardless who showed up to a tour first or is ready to sign a lease first, whoever was first to press Apply is given the first shot at the house.
At minimum, I wish re-usable applications required a small fee per property to discourage this type of application squatting behavior.
Expect Mixed Results, But Still Worth It
Anecdotally, only about one in eight listings accepted a re-usable application. We had a property manager tell us frankly that we wasted our money.
However, individual owners (especially) interpret this law strictly, probably from a lack of experience, while property management companies avoid the reusable application option entirely as they have their own process.
In our search I had two different owners tell me regardless of what was included in the reusable application, they had to offer the house to who had even submitted a request for application first (which doesn’t match my interpretation of the law, but that’s what they were doing).
Have Application Documentation Prepared Before You Start
To avoid fumbling around on your bank’s website while racing others to complete an application for Your Perfect House, have the below documentation ready, printed to PDFs and saved somewhere convenient before you‘re even seriously looking to rent.
I am positive we missed at least one house because I didn’t have all our documentation immediately at hand.
Owners requested this information over email in PDFs, so after the first few I just had a zip file I’d send with everything they could want.
Make sure you black out your social security number and account numbers on the below documentation unless asked otherwise. More than likely the owner will use a third party service like TransUnion to do a background or credit check that can more securely collect that information than floating documents over email.
Across the applications we filled out, we were asked to provide some combination of the following:
- Last two months of pay stubs
- Gross monthly income
- Net monthly income
- Last two years of W2s
- Last six months of paid rent statements
- Most recent account statements or balances proving 6x rent in cash is available in reserves
- Government issued ID
- A written positive referral from current landlord
- Personal references, phone number and email (not friends)
- Current employer’s phone number and email, and supervisor contact info
- Five years of rental history, with landlord phone and email contact info, start and end dates (exact days), monthly rent, reason for leaving.
- Written authorization to release referral information from current landlord
Be Prepared To Pay A 25% Rent Holding Deposit
In my past experience with apartments, the only fees we needed to pay were the typical first month’s rent + security deposit, and that was only after signing a lease.
Every house we applied to required first month, last month, security deposit upon signing the lease, but also a big fee just to take the house off the market. Washington law allows for a non-refundable deposit up to 25% of rent just to take the house off the market, which was about what every house we applied to required. This fee is applied towards rent if you sign, returned if you don’t qualify, but is forfeited if you abandon the house.
Success!
After a solid month of serious searching, spending a few hours every day looking at listings, calling owners, we finally secured a place this week and can call it quits!
