Most of the country's largest markets have seen their apartment cap rates continue to fall over the past year. Moreover, some of the biggest cap rate plunges have been in areas that have traditionally performed slow and steady. RealPage Analytics' Charlotte Wheeler takes a look at where cap rates in the nation's top 50 markets tracked by the company wound up at the end of the first quarter in this recent post. 

It found that 31 or 62% of the country's top 50 markets recorded lower cap rates, based on data from Real Capital Analytics. No single area of the country accounts for all of the drops, though four were in the South. The other three regions of the country each had two markets that experienced decline. 

The deepest compression was recorded in Newark-Jersey City, where cap rates fell 62 basis points (bps) year-over-year to 4.07%, which represented the eighth lowest cap rate nationally. Richmond fell 45 bps; New York 38 bps; Cincinnati 37 bps; Greensboro/Winston-Salem 35 bps; Detroit 28 bps; Sacramento 28 bps; San Jose 26 bps; Memphis 26 bps and San Antonio 25 bps. San Jose's cap rate dropped to 3.78%, becoming the second-lowest cap rate among the top 50 markets, behind Phoenix, at 3.77%.