Chicago Still A Top 5 Market For Apartment Deliveries

Metro Chicago will see the fifth-largest number of apartment units delivered in 2018 among the top 50 U.S. metros. That Chicago completion activity has spiked 25% compared with last year, RentCafé data shows.

That is despite the fact that year over year in 2017, the metro Chicago area experienced a slight population decline of 0.1%.

Overall, the Chicago market will deliver more than 10,700 apartment units this year, according to RentCafé. The vast majority of those units will be in the city, but there are also important growth nodes in the suburbs.

West suburban Lombard, for instance, will deliver 470 units this year, and Kenosha, Wisconsin, in the upper northern reaches of the Chicago metropolitan statistical area, or MSA, will see 330 units completed in 2018.

The only other markets besting metro Chicago this year in the raw number of apartment units completed will be New York, Dallas-Fort Worth, Denver and Los Angeles. All of those markets experienced population increases for the year in 2017, with Dallas-Fort Worth up 2.1% and Denver up 1.3%. Even New York and LA eked out 0.2% population growth.

A number of others markets will see annual construction spikes (in terms of percentage growth) that are considerably larger than Chicago's 25%, RentCafé said. These high-growth markets include Denver; Sacramento, California; New Orleans; Phoenix; Jacksonville, Florida; Louisville, Kentucky; San Diego; Portland, Oregon; and Milwaukee. 

Denver leads the nation in that metric, with 150% more apartment units delivered in 2018 than in 2017. Sacramento will have 143% more.

Though apartment construction is still growing in some large markets, as a whole the nation is going to see fewer apartments completed in 2018 compared with the previous year, RentCafé reports. More than 317,800 units were completed nationwide in 2017; this year, the total will be nearly 283,000 units.