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The best time to buy durable assets is rarely the moment they feel comfortable to buy.
In multifamily, rent growth tells you where a market is today, but the conditions that signal where it is heading — new supply, absorption and occupancy — can begin to change well before rents respond. Recognizing those shifts before every indicator point in the same direction is part of why we see a compelling opportunity to deploy capital through Greybrook’s U.S. Multifamily Income & Growth Fund today.
The U.S. multifamily market is among the largest, deepest and most diversified real estate investment markets in the world: millions of institutional-quality units across hundreds of distinct metropolitan economies. That scale is also why two markets in the same region can sit at different points in the same cycle.
Over the last few years, that market absorbed the largest wave of new supply since the early 1980s. The pressure fell hardest across the Sun Belt, including Metro Atlanta and Dallas–Fort Worth, the two markets anchoring our initial portfolio. Nationally, development has since contracted to levels last seen in 2011 — multifamily starts fell to roughly 55,000 units in the first quarter of 2026, a 73% decline from the 2022 peak.
What that looks like on the ground differs by market, and the difference is instructive.
In Atlanta, the balance has already turned. Deliveries peaked in 2024, and 2025 absorption reached its highest level in a decade, the first year since 2021 that demand outpaced new supply. Market rents declined modestly over the same period, with the pressure concentrated where the new supply landed: Class A lease-ups competing on concessions. Older communities did not match Class A’s rent growth, but they held occupancy through it, because almost none of the new construction competed for the same renter. The fundamentals moved before the price signal did.
Dallas is at an earlier point in the same adjustment. Deliveries peaked in 2024 near 41,500 units and are forecast to fall by about two-thirds by 2027, when demand is expected to overtake supply. Supply still exceeds demand today, and headline rents reflect it, again most acutely at the top of the market.
That is an important distinction for investors. Today’s rent growth is one input into an investment decision, but so are the direction of supply and demand, the income an asset produces today and the basis at which it can be acquired. That distinction is what our strategy is built on. We acquire stabilized, Class B communities, well-located older vintage assets that cannot be replicated at today’s construction costs, which means the buildings competing hardest for tenants are precisely the ones we do not own.
That competitive position should strengthen as the pipeline empties. One market shows the mechanism working. The other shows where it has yet to happen. We want to own both. Knowing which submarkets and vintages are actually absorbing demand is not something a national dataset tells you. That knowledge is earned market by market, deal by deal.
Two decades of investing across cycles has taught us that the turning point is never obvious in the moment. The conditions beneath it usually are.
Waiting for every indicator to confirm the turn can mean waiting until the opportunity looks very different.
