This is shaping up to be a dominant year for apartment construction in Atlanta and across the United States.

But the years that follow may see a drop in production.

Apartment completions are likely to decrease locally and nationally starting in 2025, according to an August RentCafe report analyzing commercial real estate data from Yardi Matrix.

By year’s end, analysts estimate that more than 500,000 apartment units will be completed across the U.S. That would be the most recorded in a single year.

Metro Atlanta is expected to see about 18,500 of these completed units, which would be the fifth-largest concentration of apartment deliveries in the country.

Although this climax is supported by a years-long construction surge that transpired since the onset of the pandemic, Yardi Matrix data suggests that this milestone won’t be reached again for the next four years, with developers seeming likely to downsize their operations in response to lofty construction costs.

“Most markets won’t see the impact of rapidly falling [apartment] starts translating to lower completion levels until the second half of 2025, and more likely in 2026,” said Doug Ressler, Yardi Matrix’s senior analyst and manager of business intelligence, in the report. “All said, this massive drawdown in starts across all regions sets the stage for a very different industry trajectory come 2026 and 2027.”

Multifamily development in metro Atlanta is also projected to waver in the coming years, with just 57,000 apartment units anticipated to go online between 2024 and 2028, per the report. To compare, nearly 73,500 apartments were completed from 2019 to 2023.

Nationally, about 440,000 apartment units are expected to be completed by 2025’s end, and another 332,000 units completed by the end of 2026. By 2027, apartment deliveries are projected to fall to a decade low of 319,000 units.

Still, just over 2 million apartment units are forecasted to hit the rental market by the year 2028, per the report. That's only slightly less than the approximately 2,077,000 apartments delivered nationwide between 2019 and 2023.