For Developers, Apartments Still a Safe Bet

The recession and housing crash has pushed a lot of people into rental housing and multi-family housing like apartments. The real estate industry has noticed.

According to the real estate services firm CBRE, the nationwide vacancy rate for apartment buildings dropped from 7.4 percent in 2009 to 5.2 percent in 2011. In 2011 alone, rental rates jumped nearly 5 percent. For real estate developers, apartment building is one of the few places where the money's been for the past few years. And it that continue to be the case for the next few years, according to a new set of projections in the Urban Land Institute's Real Estate Consensus Forecast [PDF]. The forecast, based on a survey of dozens of real estate economists and analysts, predicts that apartments and multifamily housing will continue to provide favorable returns to developers for at least the next three years.