Kent apartment rents were pretty much flat in September with a slight decease of 0.1%.

Year-over-year rent growth in Kent now stands at minus 0.4%, up from minus 4.7% one year ago, according to the latest report from apartmentlist.com. The 0.1% drop in September, compared to a 0.5% decrease nationwide.

“We have officially entered the off-season for the rental market,” according to apartmentlist.com. “In September, rents nationwide fell by 0.5%, the second straight monthly decline. Assuming historical trends hold, prices should continue to dip for the rest of the calendar year.”

Today the median rent in Kent is $1,416 for a one-bedroom unit and $1,749 for a two-bedroom unit. The median rent is the middle value of all the rents in a given area, meaning that half of the rents are above the median and half are below.

The citywide apartment vacancy rate stands at 5.5%, up 0.3% from this time last year.

Nine months into the year, rents in Kent have risen 1.4%. This is a faster rate of growth compared to what the city was experiencing at this point last year: from January to September 2023 rents had decreased 0.8%.

If we expand the view to the wider Seattle metro area, the median rent is $2,010 meaning that the median price in Kent ($1,720) is 14.5% lower than the price across the metro area as a whole. Metro-wide annual rent growth stands at 1.1%, above the rate of rent growth within just the city.

Sammamish is currently the most expensive in the Seattle metro area, with a median rent of $3,001. Lakewood is the metro’s most affordable city, with a median rent of $1,444. The metro’s fastest annual rent growth is occurring in Sammamish (6.7%) while the slowest is in Fife (minus 2.9%).