An upward revision that changes nothing is still worth reading. Yardi Matrix raised its 2026 multifamily completions forecast by 2.5% and its 2028 forecast by 1.3% in the Q3 bulletin released August 12, and went out of its way to say the shape of the outlook hasn’t moved. 2027 is unchanged from the Q1 update. It’s still the trough.
What actually moved, and why
The 2028 uptick comes from construction starts running roughly 20% higher year to date than the same period last year, filtered through average completion times. That’s a real signal about capital returning to multifamily, and it lands two and a half years out because that’s how long apartments take.
The near-term revision is a different animal. Units under construction and already in pre-lease keep falling, which means 2026 and 2027 deliveries will come in under what 2024 and 2025 recorded regardless of the percentage adjustment. The forecast went up because things already in the ground are finishing marginally faster than modeled, not because more of them exist.
Note on the numbers: the percentages above are confirmed in Yardi’s own release. Unit-level figures circulating in secondary coverage, including a roughly 46,000-unit gap between 2026 and 2027, come from the gated bulletin rather than the public posting and should be treated accordingly.
The two-year hole is already priced
Developers and GCs have been watching this coming since starts collapsed in 2023 and 2024. What matters now is the shape of the recovery: a shallow 2027 trough followed by a 2028 uptick is a very different staffing problem from a sustained decline. It means holding crews and superintendents through a soft year rather than releasing them, which is expensive and which smaller builders generally can’t do.
It also means the projects delivering into the 2027 trough face unusually little competing supply. That’s the argument every conversion sponsor in a downtown market is making right now, and there’s something to it.
Conversions are the wild card
Yardi’s forecast tracks conventional multifamily construction. It doesn’t cleanly capture the office-to-residential pipeline, which has been running on a separate cycle driven by discounted acquisition prices, historic tax credits and municipal incentive programmes rather than by rent growth.
Chicago’s 135 South LaSalle conversion is a fair example: 386 units in Phase 1, with first residents expected in summer 2027, delivered into precisely the year Yardi expects the fewest conventional completions. Financed largely on $98 million of TIF and roughly $40 million of federal historic credits, it’s a supply source that doesn’t respond to the same signals as a ground-up garden deal. Anyone modeling 2027 absorption in a downtown submarket should be counting those units separately.