The City of Seattle's Own Data Shows Small Housing Providers Are Disappearing

When RHAWA warns that Seattle's regulatory environment is driving small housing providers out of the market, critics dismiss it as industry talking points. So don't take our word for it. Take the City's.

What Seattle's Own Report Shows

Every year, the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections (SDCI) reports to the City Council on the Rental Registration and Inspection Ordinance (RRIO), the program that requires every rental property in Seattle to register with the City. Because registration is mandatory, the RRIO registry is the closest thing that exists to a census of Seattle's rental housing. The 2024 RRIO Annual Report, delivered to Council in May 2025, tells a story the City has been reluctant to say out loud.

Between May 2020 and the end of 2024:

• Single-family rental registrations fell 18.9 percent, from 23,853 to 19,345. That is more than 4,500 rental homes.
• Small multifamily registrations (2 to 4 units) fell 22.5 percent, from 5,420 to 4,201 properties.
• Registrations of properties with 200 or more units grew 77 percent, from 87 to 154.

Here is the part that closes off the easy excuses: this is not a shrinking rental market. Over the same period, total registered rental units grew 18.2 percent, from 160,579 to 189,844. Every large property category is at or above its 2020 level. Only the small categories are down.

The housing is still here. The small, local owners who provided it are not. Seattle's rental market is consolidating into the hands of large operators, and the City's own registry documents it.

The City Auditor Sees the Same Thing

This is not RHAWA's interpretation of the numbers. In a recent review of the RRIO program, the Seattle City Auditor described the rental market as one marked by decreasing RRIO registration renewals and an increase in large rental properties of 21 or more units. When the City Auditor and the industry describe the same trend in the same words, the debate about whether it is happening should be over.

We Warned About This in 2021

RHAWA first raised the alarm five years ago, when SDCI's annual report showed registered properties had declined 14.4 percent since 2019, a loss of nearly 4,900 properties. At the time, the City suggested the decline might simply reflect rentals converting to owner-occupied homes. Five years and two enforcement pushes later, SDCI has caught up on delinquent registrations, pursued unregistered properties, and still cannot bring single-family and small multifamily counts back to where they were. The properties did not fail to register. They left the rental market.

Why This Matters Right Now

On August 11, the Seattle City Council passed CB 121254, a sweeping rental fee ordinance that takes effect July 1, 2027. Whatever one thinks of its goals, its architecture is undeniable: a permitted-fee framework, three years of mandatory recordkeeping with a presumption of violation for inadequate records, and building-wide investigations backed by subpoena power. On top of that, the City anticipates a new per-unit rental regulatory fee in the 2027 budget.

A national operator with 200 units, a compliance department, and legal counsel on retainer can absorb that. A retiree renting out the house she raised her family in cannot. Every new layer of compliance risk tilts the field further toward scale, and the RRIO registry shows exactly where that tilt leads: fewer small providers, more consolidation, and tenants increasingly renting from the large corporate operators that Seattle's elected officials say they distrust.

Seattle says it wants small housing providers. Its policies reward scale. Its own data shows the result.

The Report Is Not Just Due. It Is Overdue.

Last year's RRIO report reached the City Council in May. It is now August, and the 2025 report is nowhere to be found. RHAWA has requested it from the City multiple times. It could be released any day. It is curious that it has not been. Maybe we understand why: the continued loss of small business housing providers is not exactly good news for a City that keeps insisting its policies protect them. That report will cover the first full year of statewide rent regulation, and it will arrive just months before the new fee ordinance takes effect.

Seattle has now had five years of its own registry telling it that small housing providers are leaving and large operators are taking their place. Five years of RHAWA saying it. A City Auditor saying it. The only people not saying it are the ones writing the policies that cause it.

We have asked. More than once. Release the report. Read your own data. And before the next ordinance, ask who is left to comply with it.