A report from Barron's on Massachusetts. "Since the Great Recession, Boston home values have risen steadily and are at an 'all-time high,' says Debbie Adamidis, an investment property specialist at Jacob Realty. Sales of high-end properties have somewhat stalled due to an oversaturation of new construction. Within the past year, 'anything over $1 million isn’t really selling as quickly as it was,' Adamidis says. 'I don’t think they’re disappearing. I just don’t think they’re flying off the shelf the way they were.'"

The New York Post. "Residents of Brooklyn’s booming Barclays Center district will soon have even more new neighbors. In a breakthrough at the slow-moving Pacific Park project, big-league New York developers TF Cornerstone and the Brodsky Organization are taking control of three major sites from the 22-acre complex’s current owners, a joint venture dominated by Greenland USA, a subsidiary of Shanghai-based development giant Greenland Group, The Post has learned."

"Pacific Park, originally called Atlantic Yards, was launched 13 years ago by Forest City Ratner. Ratner, once bullish on Pacific Park, lost its zeal over concerns that Brooklyn was becoming overbuilt with apartments. As a result, much of the site between Atlantic and Flatush avenues still has large, windswept gaps between the few apartment buildings that have gone up."

From Curbed Atlanta in Georgia. "For Atlanta renters feeling frustrated that new apartment options are disproportionately luxurious beyond their means—well, there might be something to that. Metro Atlanta was among the most active regions in the country last year when it came to the high-end apartment sector, reflecting a trend from Texas to mid-Atlantic states and beyond, a new analysis has found."

"Across the metro, nine out of 10 new Atlanta rentals qualified as 'luxury' in 2017, meaning the Yardi Matrix rental intelligence compendium classified them as Class B+ and above, according to a new report by RentCafé. (The data covered apartment projects finished in 2017 with 50 units or more). That’s good—or bad—enough for No. 9 in the country."

"But at least Atlanta isn’t Las Vegas or St. Louis, where 100 percent of apartment projects last year crossed the high-end threshold."

"So what’s going on here, broadly speaking? 'A couple of years ago high-end buildings [on a national level] represented around half of the entire share, [but] recently these projects gained more popularity,' a RentCafé rep wrote. 'Based on the high demand, developers shifted toward building more luxury rental buildings. In 2017, the construction of luxury rental properties had risen to 79 percent of all apartment construction in the U.S.'"

From AZ Big Media in Arizona. "To identify the multifamily trends that people working in commercial real estate should know about, AZRE talked with Chris Brozina, executive vice president at Mark-Taylor Companies. AZRE: Downtown urban areas (Phoenix, Tucson, Gilbert, Mesa, Scottsdale) seem to be drawing much of the current multifamily development in the Valley. What’s driving this trend?"'

"Chris Brozina: Equity. Developers develop where their equity source tells them to develop and that reflects, at least theoretically, where people want to live in apartments. The important point to understand, however, is that institutional-equity is generally headquartered on the coasts and almost never coming directly from Arizona. This means there will always be a coastal-market thought influence directing where equity is placed in a market like Phoenix. Today, the coastal, denser market trend is to build more mixed-use, dense, walkable apartments in locations that are suitable. You can see that influence in Phoenix today."

"AZRE: How do you balance the expectations of residents who are looking for higher-end amenities with the higher cost of development that comes with these expectations? How do you balance the demand vs. costs when developing new communities?"

"Chris Brozina: It’s a pretty simple business – income from the community, once stabilized, must exceed the costs to develop. Obviously the key then, is predicting those two elements as accurately as possible. Every element of the development, from location, to subcontractors, to timing exerts pressure on one of those two elements. Developers will continue to build to a higher level of luxury so long as it translates to higher level of rent and vice versa. What you see today, later in an expansion, is so much pressure on both rents and costs, that everyone is slicing the pie thinner looking for smaller nuances to differentiate their product and generally accepting a lower margin of error. The biggest costs elements in a project are large trades like framing, concrete, roofing and drywall. These things don’t change no matter what type of finishes you are putting in the apartments. At some point, cost becomes too high to develop any longer."

"AZRE: For years there’s been talk that we are overbuilding in the multifamily sector. Do you agree or disagree? "

"Chris Brozina: In a rolling, macro sense, the market is not over-built today. No accurate operating data shows that. With that said, 2018 and 2019 are expected to be the first years where actual annual deliveries outpace actual annual demand for the first time this cycle. Developers have been refreshingly disciplined this cycle, which is probably a function of tighter financing and more conservative equity. We’re probably at a time now, where certain submarkets with heavy pipeline concentrations, will have localized supply/demand issues that could cause some pain, but it will likely be temporary pain."