DFW's Multifamily Unit Boom Over Last 10 Years Leads The Nation
Dallas-Fort Worth’s multifamily boom propelled it to the nation’s biggest jump of apartment units over single-family rental homes.
Apartments at large multifamily buildings went from more than 29% of the metro’s rental supply in 2014 to over 46% in 2024, according to a report from Redfin. Despite the big jump, DFW’s 46% ranked just eighth in the U.S. for multifamily units as a share of total rental inventory, The Real Deal reported.
New York’s multifamily stock topped the list with 69% of its rental inventory.
After a decade of sustained development, DFW’s bulging multifamily pipeline finally cooled off last year. Yet the region still has 31,000 units under construction, according to Matthews’ latest multifamily market report for the metro.
That is on par with the biggest multifamily pipelines in the country.
“We have a little bit of a multifamily glut,” Steve Triolet, senior vice president of research and market forecasting at Partners Real Estate, told The Real Deal.
The region continues to work through excess supply, as Matthews’ report showed vacancy hit 12% during the fourth quarter.
However, DFW's population has grown by nearly 36% since 2010, and the region is on pace to overtake Chicago as the nation’s third-largest metro in the next decade.
That makes it difficult to overbuild multifamily, JPI Managing Director of Capital Markets Adrienne Bain said last year. Nearly 40% of the region’s construction is happening in northern suburbs such as McKinney, Frisco and Denton.
The metro also experienced a decline in construction starts for single-family rental homes, with around 8,300 of those beginning during the fourth quarter. That was a nearly 18% decline from the more than 10,000 starts during the last quarter of 2024, The Real Deal reported.
The region remains a hot spot for built-to-rent homes, with more than 5,800 units in the pipeline as of September. That’s a nearly 7% increase from June, according to RealPage.
Despite that jump, Triolet expressed concern that BTR could also get overbuilt in the region.
“That’s really new, and there’s not really a proven exit strategy,” Triolet said to The Real Deal.
Many of DFW’s latest multifamily projects are part of mixed-use developments.
Trammell Crow Co.’s residential arm recently broke ground on the multifamily portion of a transit-oriented development near Southern Methodist University. High Street Residential’s 394-unit multifamily project will be at Dallas Area Rapid Transit’s SMU/Mockingbird Station in Dallas.
Ross Perot Jr.'s Hillwood is developing a 3,200-acre master-planned community that officials said could add more than 20,000 residents to the region and be valued at $10B upon completion. The Landmark by Hillwood project in Denton will feature 6,000 single-family homes, 3,000 multifamily units, 900 acres of commercial space and 1,100 acres of parkland.
