Dive Brief:

• As economists’ year-end forecasts predicted an uptick in homeownership this year, investors chose otherwise, with a record-high $110.1 billion worth of purchases on apartment buildings in 2014.

• That’s a 15% jump from the number of rental properties that were sold in 2013, according to investment management firm Jones Lang LaSalle. Multifamily builders have "become the preferred asset class of institutional investors," Jubeen Vaghefi, managing director of JLL’s capital markets division, told Building Design + Construction magazine.

• The reason for the investors’ ongoing love affair with apartment buildings: Rents rose, on average, by 3.6% last year, and vacancy rates are at their lowest level in more than a dozen years, according to real estate research firm Reis. Properties in New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Houston, Dallas and Washington, DC, are especially attractive to investors.

Dive Insight:

All good things eventually come to an end, of course, and Census Bureau numbers show that the demand for rentals might not continue to justify rising rents for long.

Last week’s Census data on housing starts revealed that the pace of multifamily starts is slowing, which could indicate that the market is “overheating.”

Economist David Crowe of the National Association of Home Builders last week noted that the multifamily market will begin to level off as the oldest millennials begin to marry and buy their first homes.