With more than 34,000 apartments sitting empty at the end of 2025, the Denver-area apartment market reached a vacancy rate of 7.6%, the highest in 16 years, officials with the Apartment Association of Metro Denver said Wednesday.
It’s not that apartments weren’t getting rented — newly built complexes filled up faster last year than any other year other than 2021. There were just so many new units built in the past two years that the excess supply created a large backlog. Multifamily developers have built 125,000 units in the past decade. That’s about one-third of the area’s nearly 450,000 existing units.2
“When you’ve got that number of vacant units, it doesn’t surprise me that developers and management companies have gotten very aggressive with their pricing,” said Scott Rathbun, president of Apartment Insights, which compiled the data for the association. “People lower their rents until they fill up their units. And so that’s what’s happening right now. Rents are just falling lower and lower and lower because we’ve built the market up with so many vacant units that we need to fill.”
The seven-county metro Denver area includes Adams, Arapahoe, Boulder, Broomfield, Denver, Douglas and Jefferson counties…