RICHARDSON, TX—The apartment development pipeline has two main components: units under construction and those in the planning stages. With a total of about 100,000 apartments due to come on line in Dallas, New York City and Atlanta, including 39,400 in Dallas alone, it would stand to reason that there will be many more to follow.

However, RealPage analysis says this isn't the case. In the case of the three metro areas cited above, there are a little over 23,000 units in the planning stages—i.e. approved by local regulators and scheduled to begin construction within a year.

Other markets with healthy construction activity, such as Seattle and Houston, similarly have worked through much of their development pipelines at this point. RealPage says the two metro areas have fewer than 4,000 units apiece in the planning stages as of the third quarter.

“New York City, Houston, Dallas, Seattle and Washington, DC are among the leaders for apartment development activity during the current cycle,” according to a new RealPage report. “They have consistently topped the charts for completion volumes in recent years and posted some of the largest construction volumes” as Q3 came to a close.

“However, that trend could be changing,” the report states. “The volume of planned units in many of the cycle's development leaders indicate construction activity in those metros could ease over the next year.”

In fact, RealPage says, “many of the nation's largest markets—those with 400,000 or more existing units—have fewer than 10,000 units in the planning stage.” A notable exception among the leading apartment markets is the DC region, where nearly 24,000 units are in the planning stages—or more than New York, Dallas and Atlanta combined.

As of Q3 a sizable majority of the top 50 metro areas had more units under construction than in the pipeline, according to RealPage data. In all, the top 50 metros combined for around 506,000 units under construction at the end of Q3, while totaling around 229,000 planned units at the same time.

There are exceptions to the rule. The firm notes that a handful of metros, including San Francisco, Oakland, Columbus, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach and Cleveland, have more planned units than what is currently under construction.

Oakland, for example, had roughly 6,200 units under construction at the end of Q3. However, RealPage says that at 12,500 apartments, the number of planned units is more than double that volume. That volume of units in planning places Oakland as the second-busiest market for new development over the next year after DC.

Also among the five metros with the most planned units are San Francisco, with 12,100 units; Miami (11,700 units) and Los Angeles (10,200). That being the case, RealPage reported recently that even as San Francisco continues to run close behind Oakland, construction activity has been shifting to the East Bay. “As site availability has lessened and construction costs have increased in San Francisco and San Jose, developers have increasingly turned to a lower-priced Oakland, where there are generally more options in terms of where to build,” Bill Kitchens, analyst with RealPage's MPF Research, wrote last month.

Instant Insights /

Pipeline Thins Out in Major Apt. Markets

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