April carried a reserved tone at Steadfast as the investment team remained highly selective.
In this edition, we share a brief market update, a look inside Steadfast’s 2026 Community Managers (CM) Summit, and a new resource by Bill Stoll, our Chief Investment Officer, on how geopolitical uncertainty can affect commercial real estate.
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What’s Happening in the Apartment Market?
Fewer Construction Starts: Oversupply remains a near-term headwind, but future supply competition is shrinking. The delivery wave that peaked in 2024 is still weighing on rent growth. CoStar expects annual deliveries to fall from about 529,000 units in 2025 to roughly 333,000 in 2026, and RealPage reported the lightest first-quarter completion volume in four years. Our takeaway: rent growth may stay muted near-term, but future supply competition is thinning.
What about the supply story by submarkets?Much of the recent supply wave was concentrated in the South and Southwest, so markets such as Austin, Phoenix, Charlotte, Nashville, Orlando, San Antonio, and Houston are still working through a heavier delivery cycle. Within those metros, conditions are far from uniform. Some submarkets are already seeing future deliveries ease, including parts of Texas, while others still have more recent product to absorb. A few years ago, migration, job growth, and rent growth were lifting many Sun Belt and Mountain markets at once. That is less true now. The better question is not whether to like a region in its entirety but rather, which assets in specific markets and submarkets can perform even if rent growth stays muted in the near-term.
What About Geopolitics Today? Geopolitical instability matters for CRE investing when it affects deal economics.
We continued investing in our property management teams in April, the people behind the day-to-day execution that supports Steadfast’s operational performance. Steadfast brought together Community and Regional Managers from across the portfolio for an annual summit. One important focus was operational performance at the property level. A Shark Tank Cost Cutting Competition gave four teams a real onsite problem to solve under practical constraints.
Each team pitched its solution, explained the trade-offs, and the strongest proposal won a prize. Rod Emery, our CEO, thanked Steadfast’s site teams for managing through a demanding environment and emphasized the need to stay hopeful, purposeful and optimistic.
Bill Stoll attended two events that were useful in different ways. Newmark’s housing conference in Palos Verdes offered a read on market tone, bringing together many of the owners, operators, lenders, investors, and brokers shaping today’s multifamily environment. The takeaway was an affirmation that capital remains cautious, some groups are on the sidelines while others are excited about growth in select market pockets. The second event, Claude Cowork for Real Estate Business Leaders in New York, was more tactical, geared toward real estate professionals looking at practical uses of AI. Steadfast attended as part of its broader effort to refine internal systems and continuously improve how opportunities are screened and underwritten.
Investors in Estraya received their 6.5% quarterly distribution this month.
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