On a national level, there continues to be a huge demand for apartments that an average worker can afford. But developers today don’t build that many inexpensive garden-style apartments relative to the need for them.
That’s partly because many developers are most interested in urban locations, where expensive land often requires them to build more lucrative mid-rise and high-rise buildings.
“Developers are not building in the ‘burbs nearly as much this cycle. If and when attention returns to the suburbs, garden [apartments] will likely resurge,” says Andrew Rybczynski, senior consultant at research firm the CoStar Group.
However, in areas where the demand for apartments is strong and land is relatively cheap, developers are still building garden-style apartments, just not as many as in the past. Back in 2001, 84 percent of all new apartments were in buildings between one and three stories tall. In 2018, less than 30 percent of the apartments scheduled to open are garden-style apartments, according to RealPage Inc., a provider of property management software and services. The figure is projected to drop to 20 percent in 2019.
