Tampa-St. Petersburg Multifamily Market Report

Single-family housing squeeze stirs multifamily construction. The gap between an average monthly mortgage payment on a median priced home in the Tampa metro and the mean rental obligation eclipsed $1,100 as of March. A low supply of local for-sale home listings has kept single-family prices elevated. Consequently, more residents may delay homebuying over the near-term and instead remain in the renter pool for longer. These homeownership barriers are — aside from helping return net apartment absorption to positive territory over the past six months — encouraging an elevated number of project starts across the metro. The trend is especially evident in the CBD, where a pipeline equating to nearly 14 percent of existing stock was underway as of April. Elsewhere, New Tampa-East Pasco County has over 4,300 units pending completion. Here, builders are responding to a growing need for rentals following the recent inflow of industrial tenants, such as FedEx and Amazon, to nearby facilities.