This is a survey to gather information from (former) landlords who sold or otherwise removed their Seattle rental(s) at some point in the last 5 years. Seattle Grassroots Landlords is using our website (SeattleGrassrootsLandlords.org) to tell the stories of all the small-scale, independent landlords who have left the Seattle market. Our hope is to use these stories to illustrate that housing providers are, in fact, leaving and to help drive the conversation about what can be done to invite high quality housing providers to stay in the Seattle market.
If you know other landlords who have left the Seattle market, we'd love to include their stories too! Please send this link to them to direct them to this survey
https://www.seattlegrassrootslandlords.org/housing-lost. If you have any questions for us, please send us a note at
SeattleGrassrootsLandlords@gmail.com.
Our survey has two parts. The first question is where you can tell us about your experience and perspective as a landlord. After that are are a series of questions to help us fill in some details.To get you started, here's an example of the kind of story we'd like to tell on our website from your response to the first question:
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EXAMPLE - Hi, I'm Jack. Until this past January, my wife Jill and I had been landlords with a rental house in Wallingford. We also live in the neighborhood, which made keeping up with maintenance and management pretty convenient. We originally bought the rental 15 years ago as our first home together and we were able to hang onto it when we bought our next place, a little bit bigger one for our family, about 10 years ago. We've mostly had great and responsible tenants and have enjoyed our experience as landlords. We used to feel good about offering a well-priced home with a yard in a good location to people as an alternative to apartment options. Over the last few years though, the tone of local politics has become threatening, adversarial and sometimes hostile toward landlords. We like offering housing and from a financial perspective, it still would probably give us the best return for our investment. But we're not lawyers, we're not even professional property managers, and trying to keep up with all the legislative changes is a legitimate burden. Plus it feels like any moment we could inadvertently slip up on something we missed and end up with losses from a tenant taking advantage of us or punitive penalties, or both. We've never actually had a bad experience with a tenant, but the risks just seem to be accelerating and we decided it just doesn't make sense anymore. We sold the house in February to a young family who has moved in.
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We'll work with you and the information you provide here to tell your story, something like this example. If your story (answer to question 1 below) looks ready to go, we'll post it to our website as you've written it. If we need to connect with you about it first, we'll get in touch over email.
Many thanks for sharing your story!
