Dallas Led the Nation in Multifamily Growth After 2014

Large apartments are overtaking detached homes in the nation’s rental supply, and Dallas is leading the race, according to a decade-long study.

The share of single-family homes in the country’s rental stock is shrinking, and Dallas has shifted faster than any other major city. From 2014 to 2024, units at large multifamily buildings in Dallas rose from 29.2 percent to 46.3 percent of the rental inventory, the largest increase among the top 50 metropolitan areas in the country, Redfin reports.

Multifamily growth has acquainted Dallas with some strange bedfellows. The sprawling metro ranks eighth in America for multifamily units as a share of total rental inventory, right alongside some of the densest cities in the country. New York is first, with multifamily units taking up 69 percent of the rental inventory. Dallas lands between Chicago, where large apartments make up 45 percent of the rental inventory, and Washington, D.C., where multifamily units’ share is 47.3 percent.

“We have a little bit of a multifamily glut,” said Steve Triolet, senior vice president of research and market forecasting at Partners Real Estate.

Vacancy rates in apartments with at least five units exceeded 11 percent across the Dallas/Fort Worth area last year. That pushed the 8 percent to 10 percent bound conventionally considered to show a neutral landlord-tenant relationship, according to Partners.

“Some of the submarkets I would consider tenant-favorable. You can get a lot of concessions, free rent, stuff like that,” Triolet said. “If you’re in the urban core — if you’re in downtown, specifically — it’s not uncommon to get six to eight weeks of free rent for signing a lease of a year or more. When you do the math on that, that shows a little bit of distress.”

Multifamily builders in Dallas only recently put the brakes on a swift construction run that led to some oversupply. At 92.6 percent, the Metroplex registered one of the lowest multifamily occupancy rates of the largest cities in the country last year, according to Yardi Matrix.

Single-family builders have kept busy in North Texas as well, but they’re also slowing. Construction began on about 8,300 homes in the fourth quarter of 2025, a 17.7 percent year-over-year decrease from 10,190 starts in the same period of 2024.

While multifamily and residential builders slowed last year, built-to-rent developers accelerated. Over 5,800 units of built-to-rent homes were underway in Dallas in September, up 6.7 percent from June, according to RealPage. Dallas remains one of the nation’s leading markets for built-to-rent development, which could suffer from a glut in the overall rental supply.

“That’s really new, and there’s not really a proven exit strategy,” Triolet said.