Much like the last couple months, student housing pre-lease rates for Fall 2023 continue to perform at their strongest level in years. Over 40% of student housing beds at the core 175 universities tracked by RealPage Market Analytics were pre-leased for the Fall 2023 academic year, marking the highest December reading on record by a wide margin.
In a sign that the current torrid pace of apartment development may be slowing, multifamily permitting dropped to its lowest annual rate since early-2021, coming out of the pandemic lockdown period in mid-2020. The seasonally adjusted annualized rate of multifamily permitting in November fell by almost 18% from October’s rate to 509,000 units, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s monthly report.
Only three months into the student housing pre-lease season and occupancy rates are already setting records. Over 27% of student housing beds at the core 175 universities tracked by RealPage Market Analytics were pre-leased for the Fall 2023 academic year – easily the highest November rate on record. Pre-pandemic November rates tracked closer to 20% pre-leased. November’s rate of 27.1% marks a significant jump from October’s rate of 10.4%.
While apartment construction activity is up almost everywhere nationwide, five states are building nearly half the nation’s total volume of supply. The five states with the largest number of apartments under construction as of 3rd quarter 2022 include Texas, Florida, California, North Carolina and New York. Combined, these markets are building 45% of the nation’s apartments.
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, apartment markets in the Midwest region saw revenues increase below the national average, at a pace that ties with the West for 3rd place. The pandemic has had a tremendous impact on the nation’s multifamily market. One way to look at performance is to study the change in revenue per occupied square foot, one of the metrics available in the RealPage Market Analytics lease transaction data set, which is comprised of more than 11 million individual apartment leases.
Apartment rents declined in November 2022 for a third consecutive month. And although fall/winter cuts were very normal seasonally prior to COVID, this isn’t just normal seasonality in 2022. Cumulative cuts over the last three months are the largest for any three-month period since 2010, with the exception of the 2020 lockdown period. Same-store effective asking rents for new leases nationally fell 0.59% in November. That marked the third-largest month-over-month cut since 2010, topped only by April and May 2020 at the height of pandemic lockdowns, and a hair deeper than October 2022’s reduction.
One of the great housing myths is that the homeownership rate in the U.S. is going down due to higher home prices, higher mortgage rates and increased investor purchases of single-family homes. But the data just does not support the narrative. Homeownership continues to climb, reaching 66% in 2022’s 3rd quarter, which marked the highest level since 2011 (excluding the blip of 2020, when the Census had data collection problems due to the pandemic).
The annualized rate of single-family permits and starts continues to tumble, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s monthly report. Single-family permitting has declined for eight consecutive months, from an annualized rate of 1.2 million homes in February of this year to just 839,000 units in October. Year-over-year, single family permitting is down more than 22%. Additionally, single-family starts have also been declining since February, to an annualized rate of 855,000 units, about 21% below last year.
Rising interest rates have dampened apartment investment activity, but sales remain solid. Though current sales were below the peak from three quarters ago, transactions have remained at 20-year highs for much of the past two years.
The St. Louis apartment market continued at its typically stable pace in 3rd quarter, holding onto demand and logging historic rent growth while fundamentals softened in many markets in the U.S. Just like what was seen across much of the nation, demand faded in St. Louis in 3rd quarter 2022. However, this typically stable Midwestern market maintained positive absorption in the July to September time frame, logging demand for just 171 units.
Last week, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell dove into the debate over rent inflation and suggested that while new lease rent growth is slowing, “there’s still some significant (rent) increases coming” via cheaper lease renewals hiked up to market level. But RealPage data show that’s NOT exactly true for market-rate apartments. U.S. apartments plunged back to the long-term average in “loss to lease” – which means the runway for renewal lease rents will significantly narrow going forward.
U.S. apartment rents cooled for a second straight month behind weak demand. October’s cut ranked as the third largest since 2010, topped only by the COVID-era lockdown period of April and May 2020. Same-store effective asking rents for market-rate apartments dropped 0.6% in October. Cuts are seasonally common in September and October, but 2022’s reductions are notable – even if not terribly surprising – for a couple reasons. First, normal seasonal patterns have been obscured since COVID hit in 2020.
Since the beginning of 2022, multifamily building permits and starts have comprised a larger share of total residential construction, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s monthly report. Single-family permitting has declined for six consecutive months, from an annualized rate of 1.2 million homes in February of this year to just 872,000 units in September. Year-over-year, single family permitting is down more than 17%. Meanwhile, multifamily permitting has remained fairly steady, averaging 634,000 units since January and reaching an annualized rate of 644,000 units in September – up 25.5% from September 2021.
Ask anyone on the acquisitions side of the table who is active in the nation’s Sun Belt set of markets and they’ll be among the first to tell you how much more competitive the landscape is today than ten or even five years ago. This increase is something of a double edge sword. From one perspective, the rise in attention has increased liquidity within the region among other positive factors. From another perspective though, it means rising purchase prices and generally tighter cap rates.
In about a third of the nation's largest apartment markets, there have never before been this many units under construction. Over 917,000 units are currently under construction across the U.S., which will increase the nation’s existing apartment base by 4.9%, according to 3rd quarter data from RealPage Market Analytics. This is one of the biggest volumes the nation has ever seen (bested only by the 924,000 units that were under way just one quarter ago).
Detroit’s apartment market has made notable progress in recent years, evolving into a period of rapid growth after decades of turmoil. While demand has recently slipped, Detroit is preparing for an economic future that can sustain strength in a time of change. First, a history lesson. Roughly 20 years ago, Detroit’s housing market felt abandoned. Single-family homes were going for cents on the dollar.
The U.S. apartment market was fundamentally changed by the COVID-19 pandemic. But how the pandemic affected apartment rents depends largely on one thing – location. Apartment markets across the U.S. have experienced unprecedented rent change performances since the onset of the pandemic, with extreme differences in rent change levels over time and among regions and markets. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the worst moment was in late summer/early fall 2020, when annual effective asking rent cuts bottomed out at 1.5% nationwide.
The nation's student housing apartment market landscape has seen a lot of ups and downs over the last couple of years. For all the uncertainty brought by the COVID-19 pandemic, the industry rebounded swiftly to set records for rent growth and occupancy in Fall 2022. With such stellar student housing performance throughout the Fall 2022 pre-lease season, concession utilization never really manifested, according to data from RealPage Market Analytics.
New renters filled up U.S. apartments at record levels in 2021 and early 2022. But in more recent months, apartment demand has unexpectedly evaporated in much of the country due to what appears to be a freeze in new household formation. A surprisingly big slowdown in leasing traffic pushed net apartment demand moderately negative in 3rd quarter at -82,095 units – typically a seasonally strong leasing period. It also marked the first time in RealPage’s 30 years of tracking U.S. apartments that demand registered negative during a 3rd quarter period.
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, apartment markets in the Northeast region saw revenues increase above the national average, trailing only the South region as of 2nd quarter 2022. It goes without saying that the pandemic has had a tremendous impact on the nation’s multifamily market. One way to look at performance is to study the changes in revenue per occupied square foot, one of the metrics available in RealPage’s lease transaction data set which is comprised of more than 11 million individual apartment leases.
