Report: 11,100 apartment units to open in Tampa Bay this year

As local leaders continue to worry about a lack of housing in the Tampa Bay market, there may be some hope.

According to RentCafe's annual National Construction Report, the market is on track to see more than 11,111 new apartment units open by the end of the year. The majority of the new units, 4,031, will be in Tampa, with another 1,359 in St. Petersburg and 1,156 in Wesley Chapel, the report found. 

The new apartments are part of a national boom in multifamily construction expected to see 518,108 apartment units completed by the end of this year, a 9% increase compared with 2023 and a 30% increase from 2022, according to the report. 

Metro Tampa ranks No. 13 in the country with the number of new units opening, ahead of regions including Orlando, San Antonio and Los Angeles. Miami ranked No. 9, with 14,177 apartments due to be completed by the end of the year.

The growth is expected to continue for the next couple of years — despite uncertainties in industry — with more than 2 million apartments set to come online by 2028. Metro Tampa is expected to see a total of 30,381 new units to be completed by 2028, the report shows. 

Driving the growth, the report’s authors say, is that demand for rental units continues “to outstrip supply, even with recent construction efforts mirroring the building boom of the early 1970s — when a comparable number of rentals entered the market as Baby Boomers were coming of age — due to significant growth in the renter population in the last 50 years.”

“The supply wave has brought 50-year high deliveries to certain metros … but the increased competition is slowing rent growth, especially in booming Sun Belt markets,” Doug Ressler, senior analyst and manager of business intelligence at Yardi Matrix, adds in the report.

But the news is not all good despite the reported slowing in rent growth.

The report’s authors say most of the apartments built nationally in the last five years, as well as those currently under construction, are aimed at mainly upper-, middle- and high-income renters.

That’s troubling in the Tampa region — and across most of Florida — where a shortage of inventory is a problem, but nowhere near as big a problem as a shortage of inventory that’s affordable. While metro Tampa is not mentioned specifically in terms of affordability, all one needs to do is look at the monthly rents, locations and amenities of most new buildings under construction to see who the developers are catering to.

RentCafe, a nationwide apartment search website, says it analyzed new apartment construction data across 369 metropolitan statistical areas to come up with its findings. The study is based on data for buildings with more than 50 units.