It’s taken six years, but developers are finally slowing down when it comes to building new apartments across the country.
RENTCafe, relying on numbers from its sister division Yardi Matrix, reported that developers are expected to deliver 283,000 new apartment units to the market in 2018. That’s an impressive number, but it’s actually down 11 percent when compared to 2017.
In fact, 2018 marks the first time in six years that the apartment market saw a year-over-year drop in new multifamily deliveries.
RENTCafe says that the last time apartment deliveries dropped on a year-over-year basis was in 2011.
This doesn’t mean that the last three years haven’t been quite busy for apartment construction. RENTCafe said that by the end of 2018, the number of new apartments during the last three years is projected to pass the 900,000 mark. That’s the highest three-year stretch since the mid-1980s. Apartment construction last peaked at 933,000 deliveries between 1983 and 1985.
