The apartment data we published today features revised historical time series, prompted by growth in the dataset. As our providers continue to expand their metro sample sizes and their overall geographic coverage, we have enhanced our aggregation methodology to give us greater flexibility in incorporating the new data.

Although many U.S. apartment markets and submarkets are seeing elevated supply trends soften their fundamentals, in some cases this is needed supply and these are the natural “growing pains” of densifying, maturing cities.

I recently moved from Boston to Denver and the difference in cost of living served as a welcome income multiplier. I'm not alone in that experience: strong push and pull factors are underpinning U.S. demographic and migration trends (and the local economic strength of markets like Denver, Austin, Nashville, Phoenix and more).

So what lies ahead for affordability?

Which markets are more likely to experience change in homeownership, and why? How will multifamily performance respond?

It’s no surprise that concessions are on the rise in many multifamily markets, and operators and developers are increasingly turning to non-traditional concessions. Here we show how such concessions can have a material impact on returns.

With Q2 2017 data finally in, we can take a fresh look at how rent dynamics have changed so far in 2017, and note some patterns in our forecasts.

Real estate cap rates' decline alongside government interest rates over the past 30 years has buoyed returns, with property values at pace with inflation but property net income falling behind. If cap rates begin to rise, appreciation could vanish.

Observing that apartment assets near light rail stations achieve higher rents and revenue than others, we looked into whether that proximity confers the advantage, and whether other factors play a part.

On the strength of the current and future apartment construction pipeline, headlines and commentary are all over the place: It's common to see "boom," "explosion" and "surge" characterizing the current environment, even as reports assert that not enough housing is being built and that much more multifamily housing will be needed to keep up with demand. Which narrative is correct?

In many markets with mature development pipelines, newer assets' effective rent growth is decelerating significantly.

New York City drives a lot of trends, including our calculation of rent growth for the Sum of Markets. Year-over-year effective rent growth was 0.2% in Q4; though it's meant to represent the national trend, for most of us, that figure doesn’t exactly fit our experience. So, how did we arrive at 0.2%?