A New Perspective on Apartment Construction

I read last week from James RE Services that developers are currently building 25,700 new apartment units across metro Denver and another 27k are proposed to be built years further out. These 25k units will be completed over the next 2 years. Since 2013 developers have been pulling at least 10,000 permits a year every year since, with an average of about 11k units a year. WOW!

Amazingly, even greater growth has happened before in Denver from 1970-1973 when builders pulled an average of 16,674 permits a year for those 4 years with a peak of nearly 25k permits in 1972. Thus, our growth this time around isn’t so big. Plus, back in the early 70’s only a million people lived here.

In another story from the DBJ, Yardi Matrix said it’s expected that builders in metro Denver will complete 15,187 new apartment units this year, which would be the 3rd highest number in the country. One reason cited for the big jump was that some 2017 deliveries got pushed back into 2018 due to a lack of qualified labor.