Since the early 2000s, more people began favoring walkable urban environments over traditional suburbia. Surprisingly, this shift to urban living did not cause CBD rent growth to outpace the sleepier suburbs.

To no one’s surprise, multifamily growth is slowing from the pre-COVID trend and certainly from recent years. Where rents are slowing the most is more surprising.

With record home prices and rising interest rates, more and more people have chosen to rent. It is likely that mortgage rates will ease in coming quarters providing some relief to homebuyers.

Multifamily vacancy rates, currently hovering near pre-COVID levels, are poised to increase. A moderate recession—which we believe will begin later this year—will temper household formation and lead to higher vacancy in every major market.

Multifamily vacancy rates, currently hovering near pre-COVID levels, are poised to increase. A moderate recession—which we believe will begin later this year—will temper household formation and lead to higher vacancy in every major market.

Office-to-multifamily (OTM) conversions is a popular topic in the media, but rare, and unlikely to impact the bottom line of either sector.

Multifamily demand is slowing amid worrying signals about the direction of the economy. Nevertheless, structural supply shortages remain and most major cities have plenty of headroom to build more units.

Historically, for-sale housing affordability and multifamily vacancy rates have been correlated, though a causal relationship between the two is not always apparent.

Nationally, Class C multifamily properties have set the pace for rent growth, but this isn't the case everywhere. See EA's latest brief to track where Class A and B rent growth outpaces C.

CBRE’s H2 2021 Cap Rate Survey reveals a clear geographic pattern in multifamily cap rate compression.

As restaurants, bars and other urban amenities reopened, apartment fundamentals began to recover.

We assembled a panel of expert economists who specialize in each property type to talk about the outlook and pandemic implications for each. Read the recap or watch the presentation.

Multifamily fundamentals weakened in Q4 2020 as COVID-19 continues to take a toll on the U.S. economy. The vacancy rate for our national sample of properties increased to 4.5%. Average monthly rents posted their largest Y-o-Y decline in 10 years, falling 4.2%. The supply pipeline remains strong, with stock growing a healthy 1.7% Y-o-Y.

It was a tumultuous 2020 and high levels of COVID-19 infections mean that it will be a difficult start to 2021, but economic prospects for the rest of the year are bright. This will provide a much more supportive environment for real estate, but challenges remain.

We expect national multifamily fundamentals to bottom out in early 2021 and to recover by mid-2022 with smaller markets leading the recovery in early 2022 followed by major metros. The long-term outlook for multifamily remains strong, with both rent and vacancy expected to recover to pre-COVID levels by Q2 2022.

Riding strong pre-COVID demand, and supported by generous federal and state stimulus packages, multifamily fundamentals were only modestly impacted by pandemic-related economic shocks in Q2 2020. The long-term outlook for multifamily remains strong, with both rent and vacancy expected to recovery to pre-COVID levels by Q1 2022.

Based on preliminary data, CBRE EA estimates a Q2 2020 vacancy rate of 4.6% for our national sample of professionally managed multifamily properties, up 70 basis points (bps) year-over-year and 40 bps quarter-over-quarter.

Multifamily fundamentals are projected to follow a similar shape as the U.S. economy over the next two years: a sharp downturn followed by a quick recovery.

Though apartment fundamentals are expected to hit their weakest points one quarter later than employment, they are also projected to return to pre-COVID levels more quickly, hitting Q1 2020 levels one quarter earlier, in Q1 2022.

Please be aware of changes to our Apartment Submarket definitions. The 886 Apartment SubmarketIDs that have historically been delivered are being retired and a new set of 800 SubmarketIDs will be added.

We are facing a growing housing affordability problem. This led to rent control in some states. But what are the implications?

Recent construction data suggest that multifamily supply growth will peak in Q4 2018 and correct to near the 10-year average by 2020. If you’ve been reading EA’s Q3 2018 Apartment Overview and Outlook, you may be saying, “don’t completions routinely come in at 15-25% under the construction projections?” What kind of construction delays might we see in Q4 2018?

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%?