As of November 2023, it was estimated that there were 988,000 homes under construction in multi-family buildings containing 5 or more units. This is in comparison to 680,000 single-family homes, according to US Census data. (Looking at the below graph, it's also interesting to see how the supply of single-family homes dropped off after the global financial crisis and multi-family apartments took off.)

All of this means that in 2024, the US is on track to complete more apartments than it has in many many decades. In fact, exactly similar to what we experienced here in Toronto, if you want to find a comparable multi-family supply number, you need to go as far back as the 1970s (see below). Of course, the US had fewer people back then, and so on a per capita basis, it was building more housing.

Still, all of this new supply is having an impact. Apartment List recently published its national rent report, over here. And overall, it found that:

Rent increases are currently being moderated by a robust construction pipeline expected to deliver a decades-high number of new apartment units in 2024.

More specifically, they found that the cities with the most supply are now seeing the largest rent declines:

Many of the steepest year-over-year declines remain concentrated in Sun Belt cities that are rapidly expanding their multifamily inventory, such as Austin (-7.4 percent year-over-year), Raleigh (-4.4 percent), and Orlando (-3.9 percent).

If you're an apartment developer, this is not what you want to see. It means that increased competition is creating downward pressure on rents and that vacancy rates are probably rising. But if you're someone looking to rent an apartment, this is exactly what you want to see. You want more affordable housing. And so, as a consequence, you want more homes to be built. Because when supply outstrips demand, this is what you get.

Charts: Apartment List

At the end of 2020, I wrote about a cross-laminated timber apartment building that Joanne and Fred Wilson were building in Brooklyn at 383 Greene Street.

Well, that project is now complete and stabilized, and it turns out that it was the first CLT apartment building ever built in NYC, which is quite an accomplishment.

On her blog, Joanne describes the project as being a "labor of love", and that certainly sounds right. But they are now also onto their next CLT apartment building at 122 Waverly Avenue (called Frame 122).

This would suggest that whatever their development model is, it is working for them. My assumption is that they want to both make our cities more sustainable and own high-quality rental assets for the long-term (possibly forever).

If you'd like to see how 122 Waverly was assembled, here's a short video that Joanne recently posted on her blog:

Here is an interesting chart, from Mike Moffat, that looks at housing completions -- both ownership and rental -- in the province of Ontario. The way to read this chart is that, for each date, you are looking at completions for the previous 10 years. (It says 12, but that seems to be a mistake.) For example, Q4-1964, which is the start of this chart, equals all homes built between Q1-1955 and Q4-1964.

Three things will probably immediately stand out to you:

1. We built a lot of multi-family housing in the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, we built more than we're building right now and that wasn't just the case in Toronto and Ontario. In Canada as a whole, the majority of building permits (60%) issued between 1962 and 1973 were for multi-family buildings. More specifically though, this was a rental apartment boom, as opposed to a condominium boom.

2. We then said: "Nah, let's not build so many apartments anymore. Let's go back to building more single-family houses."

3. And that's what we did -- by a fairly wide margin -- until the early 2000s when the next great multi-family boom started to take hold. This time, though, it developed into a condominium boom.

Both multi-family booms have mirrored periods of overall economic expansion. But you also need to look at what government was doing. In the 1960s and 1970s we made it attractive to build rental housing (whereas today it's a very challenging asset class to underwrite). And then more recently, we decided that much of our growth should happen in existing built-up urban areas. That generally means more multi.

But multi-family is a fairly broad term. Are we talking about 4-storey walk-ups or are we talking about 40-storey tall buildings? For those of you who are able to look through this chart to what's happening in the market, you'll know that we are far more effective at the latter. We have a lot of work to do when it comes to the in-between housing scales.