My non-expert opinion,  or perhaps just rationalizing to myself:These are primarily the "luxury"   amazon dormitories being built in downtown and south lake union areas that are having vacancy issues,   and thats in large part just because of how many are coming online, and how many thousands more are still in the pipeline,    coupled with modest slowdowns in tech hiring.   

I'm a Real Estate Broker, I do my own deals, and I have traditional RE clients, but I also have a couple other businesses I run. 

I have a couple of these relationships and though they work for the bank they've given me good advice along the way. 

A couple of tips:- Get mass saves to come out to do an assessment.

I have done a couple of flips in this area and was very familiar with the neighborhood.

Trish Geyer I haven’t been a landlord long but here are the downsides and upsides I’ve had so far: inherited couple tenants, break up, don’t pay rent, leave junk behind.

The whole commission thing is going to be an issue for most lenders, until you work in that field for a couple years.  

There are lots of situations where we'd say the guy is living there but a new couple wouldn't think of him as living there.

We have a couple of properties that required some work, but we know nothing about that part of investing, so we have a joint partnership with other investors who ARE qualified to do that work, we both benefit from the transaction. 

Now after a couple of our deals we have more capital we want to leverage to get 2 to 3 rehabs going at once, rather than one at a time.