How to Find the Sweet Spot of Rental Pricing For Your Seattle Home

Getting the right price for your Seattle rental property is all about market data, right? Not always. Find out what happens when you take a more human approach to pricing your home on the Washington rental market. 

In 2022, the Seattle rental market skyrocketed. Fuelled by jobs growth in the area, it was reported that Seattle rents are up 29% over last year. This is well above the already-high average nationwide increase of 15%. 

But how long will this last? Large price rises should slow in the later half of the year, so is now the right time to raise rents through the roof? Or should you be looking long-term, creating fairer pricing to stop your residents from bailing every 12 months in search of a better deal?

There’s also the new issue emerging that will affect locals. Some of Seattle’s biggest employers — including the goliath that is Amazon — are now overstaffed. What happens when job growth slows down? If you capitalize on growth outside of the greater Seattle area, what happens to your rental value when remote workers get called back into the office?

You see, market data is great, but it’s not perfect. If you look at the hard numbers alone, as most real estate agents and property managers do, you could be setting yourself up for failure later. Overprice your home now and you will be limiting your applicant pool and risk having to drop your rates dramatically when the market softens. Price too low now and you could devalue your property or even upset your HOA. 

How to price your Seattle rental property

The old model for rental rates used to be to ask for 1% of the mortgage rate or property value. This model is painfully outdated. With the rate of inflation and interest rate hikes, you could have difficulty finding someone to rent your home at that ask. 

The best way to avoid leaning too hard on market data, speculation, and outdated calculations is to take a human approach to renting your home. After all, that’s exactly what renters are and your home is set to become theirs when they move in. 

While the property managers of Washington are keeping an eye on comps, Belong takes a different approach to pricing homes on the rental market. Belong has ditched the property management model to offer a completely unique service that takes a humanized approach to the rental market —  including pricing. 

When helping owners price their homes for the Seattle rental market, Belong uses technology to blend live market data with an all-important metric: real-time demand for your home. By looking at how many people are in the market and their budget, we can determine the right price for your home that will maximize rental income, while attracting the best people to care for your home in the long term. Renters love Belong because we extend our services to them as part of our community, ensuring we find the best of the best to place in your rental property. 

Belong’s average time to rent in Washington is an industry-leading 12 days

Once your home is listed on Belong, we get a true measure of the market by looking at impressions, clicks, tour sign-ups and how many people have started applications. With all of that data at our fingertips — plus local-market benchmarks — we can work with homeowners to react quickly and maximize rental value, while minimizing vacancy. As a result, we trump the property management industry with an average time to rent of just 12 days in Washington (as of May 2022). 

And if you want to keep your cash-flow running in those 12 days (or less!), we can make sure you continue getting paid with our fee-free Smooth Payments option, unique to Belong. 

Goldilocks rental pricing that is juuuust right.

What happens when you couple current market data with live, real-time demand from the local rental market? The sweet spot, the Goldilocks of rental pricing. Belong takes the guesswork out of what to charge by using first-class technology to determine the right price for your home, including what high-quality, long-term residents are prepared to pay right now. 

The end result is fewer vacancies, great people caring for your home, profitable rental income, and no tricks or compromises that could devalue your home as a rental investment. 

Find out how Belong would value your rental home at belonghome.com/homeowners.