Building cranes still tower over downtown Miami—the busiest market in the U.S. for the planned development of multifamily housing. Immigration has kept the population of Miami growing, and that has kept developers busy planning new projects.

Miami is number one on CoStar’s list of markets with more than 50,000 units with the highest share of apartments under construction as a percentage of existing inventory.

Developers had 16,777 new units of multifamily housing in some phase of the development process in Miami in the third quarter of 2018, according to CoStar. That works out to 11.4 percent of the current inventory.

Research firm MPF counts 9,656 new rental apartments under construction in the Miami-Miami Beach-Kendell, Fla. metro area. (MPF only counts apartments that are physically under construction, instead of counting projects that have been announced, but may still be arranging their financing or building permits.) That’s equal to 3.3 percent of the inventory across the broader metro area.

The asking rents in Austin fell 0.6 percent from year-end 2013, but the city still ended up in ninth place, with asking rents of $.28.76 per sq. ft. MOB vacancy in Austin was at 11.2 percent at year-end 2014.

San Diego got a score of 65.8, overtaking Raleigh-Durham in the third spot since last year. The city has 17 million sq. ft. of life sciences space, with a vacancy rate of 7.3 percent and asking rents of $40.80 per sq. ft.

With MOB vacancy at only 5.4 percent, asking rents in San Jose rose 4.8 percent year-over-year, to $29.31 per sq. ft.

Los Angeles boasted asking rents of $29.73 per sq. ft. at the end of the year, up 4 percent compared to year-end 2013. Vacancy in the city averaged 9.1 percent.

Asking rents in Washington, D.C. declined 0.6 percent year-over-year, but ended up at a still healthy $29.99 per sq. ft. The decline may have had something to do with a vacancy rate that averaged 13.1 percent.

Seattle, on the other hand, posted a vacancy rate of only 7.0 percent at year-end, and a 1.1 percent increase in asking rents, to $30.22 per sq. ft.

Asking rents for MOBs in Orange County, Calif. jumped 4.9 percent, to $30.64 per sq. ft. Vacancy in the area averaged 9.8 percent.

The San Francisco Bay area ended up with a score of 79.7 in this year’s ranking. Life sciences space in the market totals 20.0 million sq. ft., but vacancy remains relatively tight at 5.1 percent. Asking rents average $50.98 per sq. ft.

Larger gateway markets continue to generate big sales volumes. The one market where there has been a notable drop-off is in New York City. Although Manhattan continued to see some mega deals during the first half, the $10.62 billion in total property sales is down 55 percent year-over-year. One notable big sale during the period was the $2.2 billion deal for 245 Park Avenue.

A factor that may be contributing to the slowdown is that there has been more foreign capital that has come into that market that prefers to buy and hold assets over the long term. So there are fewer buying opportunities, notes Coghlan.