Greystar Takes Crown as Top US Apartment Owner

Greystar is now the largest apartment owner in the U.S., snatching the crown from perennial leader Mid-America Apartments (MAA), according to the latest rankings from the National Multifamily Housing Council.

Charleston, SC-based Greystar scored a trifecta of top categories in NMHC’s annual rankings, also notching the top positions as the largest manager and with the largest development pipeline.

Greystar added nearly 10,000 new units to its portfolio in 2023, primarily in the Sun Belt, bringing its total to 108,566. In addition to the units it owns, Greystar is managing 789,272 units across the country, according to NMHC’s year-end count, CoStar reported.

The 2023 tally does not include a partnership between Greystar and Wood Partners, announced in February, in which Greystar took over Wood’s property management. The February deal increases the total number of units managed by Greystar to more than 895K—and the number of units owned or operated by the company to more than 1M.

Tennessee-based MAA, which has led NMHC’s annual list of apartment owners for six of the past seven years (in 2022, Starwood took the crown), finished second in the new ranking with a total of 100,894 units. MMA added 1,200 units in 2023, according to the trade group.

Morgan Properties, Nuveen and AvalonBay Communities rounded out the top five, with Nuveen jumping from number seven to number four on NMHC’s list by adding more than 11,000 units to its portfolio in 2023.

A perfect storm of market conditions is squeezing apartment owners and operators as 2024 unfolds: a flood of new supply, slowing or flattening rent growth, rising operating costs including the cost of insurance, and a wave of CMBS loans coming due.

Nationally, the multifamily market added 565,000 units in 2023, a 40-year high, according to a report from CoStar’s Apartments.com. The onslaught of new units won’t end soon—another 443,000 rental apartments are in the pipeline, with most of them scheduled to be delivered in the first half of the year.

“2023 was clearly a challenging year for many rental housing providers, builders and managers due to economic uncertainty, interest rate hikes, and rising uncontrollable costs such as insurance, construction costs, wages and local and state property taxes,” Sharon Wilson Géno, NMHC’s president, said in a statement.

Cumulatively, the portfolios of the 50 largest apartment owners on NMHC’s rankings list encompass a total of almost 2.5M units, or about 10% of the nation’s apartments.

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