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Market Commentary

The supply scoreboard

Six property types, two questions: how much new space is being built, and how full is what already stands? One sector answers both the way an owner wants — and it is the one that is not allowed to change its answer.

Ryan Smith Aug 20268 min read

Key takeaways

40 sources ↓
  • Two questions, six sectors: new supply as a share of standing stock, and the share of existing space sitting empty — every figure from the sector's own tracker, every source cited.
  • The wave and its digestion: apartments delivered a record 588,883 units in 2024 and demand absorbed more than that; storage grew its stock 3.0% in 2025; industrial's record 2023 wave is clearing.
  • The office anomaly: the construction pipeline sits 87% below its 2020 peak — and a fifth of the stock still stands empty, with attendance at ~54% of pre-pandemic.
  • The manufactured-housing anomaly: roughly ten new communities in two decades while every official closure series runs the other way — ~95% occupancy, site rents +7.0%, supply zoned shut and slowly leaking to redevelopment.

Two questions for every building

Every property type in America answers the same two questions: how much more of it is being built, and how full is what already stands? Ask both at once and the sectors stop looking interchangeable.

This is the cross-sector file behind the land thesis. Nobody is making more of these showed one sector's stock standing still; this piece puts that stillness next to apartments, office, self-storage, industrial and retail — every figure from the sector's own tracker, every source attached. No blending, no adjectives. Two questions, six answers.

Round 1 of 3: How many Americans live in manufactured homes?

Three figures about the sector this article keeps circling back to — all stated and sourced below. Drag, commit, and see how calibrated you are. No stakes. Almost no stakes.

25Myour guess
0M50M

All three answers live in the article: residents via HUD,32 site rents via Northmarq,23 and the communities count via Green Street Advisors.3

How much is being built

Start with the flow of new space, stated the only honest way: as a share of the space that already exists, measured by each sector's own tracker. A million square feet means nothing until you know the denominator.

Apartments just finished the biggest construction wave in a generation. RealPage counted a record 588,883 units delivered in 2024 — roughly 3.0% of the ~19.4 million professionally managed units it tracks — before deliveries eased to about 409,500 in 2025, near 2.1% of stock.1 The Census Bureau's broader count tells the same story: 608,000 multifamily completions in 2024, the most since 1986, then 484,000 in 2025.4 Twenty years of the Census completions series puts that wave in proportion — 129,900 units finished in the 2011 trough, 591,700 at the 2024 peak, a four-and-a-half-fold swing inside two decades33 — and it is now receding fast: first-quarter 2026 starts of roughly 55,000 units were down 73% from the early-2022 peak, the lowest quarterly pace since 2011.5

Self-storage added 3.0% to its stock in 2025 — against a long-term average of 4.2% — and Yardi Matrix expects 2.4% in 2026, with first-quarter starts down 29% year over year.6 Industrial delivered a record 609.6 million sq ft in 2023 — about 3.5% of the standing stock — then 280.4 million in 2025, roughly 1.6%; second-quarter 2026 completions were the lowest CBRE has recorded since 2016.7,8

Then the flow stops. Office completions over the year through mid-2026 were 0.3% of inventory — a 14-year low — and the construction pipeline, at 15.4 million sq ft, sits 87% below its 2020 peak, the lowest level since CBRE began tracking in 1990.9,2 Only 9.8 million sq ft of office construction was started in all of 2024.10 Retail is quieter still: first-quarter 2026 completions were the lowest quarterly volume in two decades, the shopping-center pipeline is under 0.3% of inventory, and retail inventory has grown less than 0.5% a year for a decade.11,12,13

And then there is manufactured housing, where the flow of new communities is not a small number — it is approximately no number at all. A Green Street Advisors analyst put it at roughly ten new communities built in the United States in two decades,3 the Urban Institute records that few have been built since 2000,14 and the national count has stood near 43,000 communities and 4.3 million homesites.15 Industry operators estimate at least ten communities are torn down for redevelopment every year,16 and where states keep official count the direction is confirmed — Lument's research calls the national pad inventory "shrinking on the margin" (the closure record is in Figure 4.1).38,34

Figure 1.1 · The pipeline, per sector

New supply as a share of what already stands

Latest new supply divided by standing stock — numerator and denominator always from the same tracker. Storage and apartments are digesting a wave; office and retail have gone quiet; manufactured-home communities round to zero.

New supply as a share of existing stock, by sector

Most recent period each tracker reports · bases differ by sector — every numerator and denominator is in the work panel

≈10
new manufactured-home communities built in the U.S. in two decades — a Green Street Advisors estimate that has never needed updating
588,883
new apartment units delivered in 2024 alone — the record year of the modern construction wave (RealPage)
−87%
office construction pipeline vs. its 2020 peak — the lowest since CBRE began tracking in 1990
Data table
Show the work — sources & the ratio rule
The ratio rule: every bar divides a tracker's own numerator by that same tracker's denominator — mixing firms fabricates a statistic. Self-storage: Yardi Matrix states 2025 new supply at 3.0% of total stock.6 Apartments: RealPage's ~409,500 units delivered in 2025 over its ~19.4M-unit professionally managed universe = ~2.1% (the record 2024 year was ~3.0%).1 Industrial: Cushman & Wakefield's 280,359,487 sq ft delivered in 2025 over its 18,024,889,918 sq ft year-end inventory = 1.6%.7 Office: Cushman states trailing-four-quarter completions of 15.6M sq ft through Q2 2026 equal 0.3% of its 5.42B sq ft inventory.9 Retail: Cushman shopping-center deliveries of 5,426,107 sq ft in H1 2026, annualized over 4,198,665,002 sq ft of inventory = ~0.26%, shown as ≈0.3%.12 Manufactured-home communities: ~10 new communities in two decades (Green Street, 2017) on a base of ~43,000 is roughly 0.001% a year — charted as ≈0, which is the point.3,15
The caveat, stated before anyone asks: the Green Street figure dates to 2017 and is an estimate, not a census; the Urban Institute's "few built since 2000" and the flat national community count corroborate its direction.14,15 Bases differ by sector (units vs. sq ft; tracked universes vs. totals) — these bars compare each sector against itself, which is the comparison that matters to an owner.

Figure 1.2 · Twenty Census years

One pipeline swings — the other never left its band

The same statistical system, two decades, two pipelines. Apartment completions collapsed to 129,900 units, tripled to a 591,700 peak, and turned down again — a supply response doing what supply responses do. Manufactured-home shipments spent all twenty years inside a 50,000–113,000 band, because the input that would let them scale — zoned land — is the thing nobody adds.

Two Census pipelines, thousands of units per year, 2005–2025

Apartment completions (buildings with five units or more, Census NRC) vs. new manufactured-home shipments (Census MHS) · hover for any year

Manufactured-home shipments Apartment completions (5+ units)
4.6×
the swing in the apartment pipeline across two decades — 129,900 units (2011) to 591,700 (2024), same Census series
20 yrs
manufactured-home shipments never left the 49,700–112,900 band — a pipeline capped by land, not demand
467.7k
apartment units completed in 2025 as the wave recedes — still above every pre-2024 year in the series
Data table
Show the work — sources & the two series
Sources: apartment series — U.S. Census Bureau, New Residential Construction, annual housing units completed in buildings with five units or more, from the Bureau's 1968–present time-series workbook;33 manufactured-home series — Census Manufactured Housing Survey shipments, as in Figure 4.2.29 Both series are read directly from the Bureau's published workbooks; the full annual table is above.
Basis notes: the NRC figure for 2024 (591,700, five-plus-unit buildings) differs from the 608,000 quoted in the prose because the latter is the Bureau's Survey of Construction count of ALL multifamily (two-plus units)4 — same system, different cut, stated so the two numbers cannot be mistaken for a contradiction. And a shipped manufactured home is not a completed community: shipments measure the factory pipeline, which is exactly the point — the homes exist, the land does not.3

How full is what exists

Supply is half the scoreboard. The other half is whether anyone needs the space that already stands — and here the six sectors split cleanly.

Office is the outlier, and not narrowly. Cushman & Wakefield put national office vacancy at 20.1% in mid-2026; Moody's, tracking a tighter set of competitive buildings, recorded 21.0% in the first quarter — an all-time record; CBRE's measure sits at 18.3%.9,17,2 The trackers disagree on the level and agree on the story: roughly a fifth of America's office space stands empty. Badge-swipe data explains why — office attendance in August 2026 was still only about 54% of its pre-pandemic baseline, six years after the shock.18 The nuance worth stating: absorption has turned — CBRE counts nine straight positive quarters — but it is filling a hole dug 171 million sq ft deep in the first pandemic year.2,9

Apartments are the opposite surprise: the record wave got eaten. Demand absorbed 666,699 units in 2024 — more than the record supply delivered — and occupancy climbed back to 95.5% by mid-2026, slightly above its decade average, even as rents stayed roughly flat (−0.2% year over year).1 Self-storage sits mid-cycle: the largest operator's same-store portfolio ran 92.5% occupied, but advertised street rates were still drifting −1.7% year over year in June 2026 as the sector digests its build-out — even with a demand base that quietly widened from 11.1% of U.S. households in 2022 to 13.4% in 2024, the largest jump the industry's recurring survey has recorded.19,6,20 Industrial's vacancy rose from a 3.1% trough in 2022 to 7.1% in 2025 and has likely crested, at 6.9%, with rent growth re-accelerating to +2.9%.7

Retail is tight — CBRE's availability measure held at 4.9%, and CoStar sees vacancy peaking just under 4.4% — but it earned that tightness by shrinking: more than 130 million sq ft of retail was demolished in five years, and retail space per capita has fallen since 2009.21,22,13 Demand is steady rather than growing; CoStar's 2026 absorption forecast would be the third-lowest in a decade.22

Manufactured-home communities run 94.9% occupied nationally, with the average asking site rent at $752 a month, up 7.0% year over year — the strongest verified rent print of the six sectors — and the two largest owners report core or same-property occupancy between 94.3% and 97.9%.23,24,25 Behind that sits the demand no cycle touches: the U.S. is short 7.2 million rental homes affordable and available to its lowest-income renters,26 and a new manufactured home costs $84 per square foot against $169 for a new site-built home before land — a ratio the Census comparison table shows holding between 45% and 52% in every one of the eleven years it covers.27

Figure 2.1 · Space standing empty

Vacancy is not one number — it is the demand verdict

Share of existing space sitting empty, by each sector's own tracker. Apartments and manufactured housing are effectively full; office has a fifth of its stock dark. The measure differs by sector — the work panel names every basis.

Share of existing space standing empty, by sector

Latest reading per tracker, 2025–2026 · lower = fuller · tracker named at right

7.2M
rental homes the U.S. is short for extremely-low-income renters — the structural demand floor under affordable housing (NLIHC, 2026)
+7.0%
year-over-year growth in the average manufactured-housing site rent ($752/month) — the strongest verified rent print of the six sectors
54%
office attendance vs. its pre-pandemic baseline, August 2026 — six years after the shock, the demand side never came back (Kastle)
Data table
Show the work — sources & the basis warning
Bases, named: apartments = 100 minus RealPage occupancy (95.5%, 2Q 2026, professionally managed market-rate stock; CoStar's broader universe reads 8.2%).1,5 Manufactured housing = 100 minus Northmarq's national community occupancy (94.9%, Q2 2025).23 Retail = CBRE availability (4.9%, Q2 2026; Cushman's shopping-center vacancy reads 6.0% against a 7.4% historical average).21,12 Industrial = Cushman vacancy (6.9%, Q2 2026).7 Self-storage = 100 minus Public Storage's same-store average occupancy (92.5%, Q2 2026 — the largest operator's stabilized portfolio; Extra Space read 94.2% and CubeSmart 91.0% on their own definitions).19 Office = Cushman vacancy (20.1%, Q2 2026; Moody's record 21.0%, CBRE 18.3%).9,17,2
The warning: these are six different rulers. Each bar is honest about its own sector; fine-grained cross-sector comparisons (is 4.5% "tighter" than 4.9%?) are not supportable and the prose does not make them. What is supportable: four sectors cluster in the 4–8% band, and office does not.

The scoreboard

Put both questions on one map and the six sectors sort themselves into four corners. Where you want to own is the quiet-and-full corner: nothing new coming, and the existing stock spoken for.

Two sectors live there. Retail arrived by subtraction — demolition and a decade of sub-0.5% supply growth restored its balance, but its demand line is flat.13,22 Manufactured-home communities were born there: the gate that keeps supply near zero is zoning itself — Equity LifeStyle's annual filing names the difficulty of obtaining zoning permits as the single most significant barrier to entry,25 and a Freddie Mac study of 825 jurisdictions found 57% required lots larger than half an acre for a manufactured home28 — while the demand line (a 7.2-million-home shortage, a 2-to-1 cost advantage per square foot) points up and to the right.26,27 Same corner, different physics.

Figure 3.1 · Two questions, one map

Supply on one axis, demand on the other

Each sector plotted by its Figure 1.1 supply share (across) and its Figure 2.1 empty share (up). The corners tell the story: office is quiet and empty, apartments built and filled, and the bottom-left corner is where scarcity lives.

New supply (share of stock) vs. space standing empty, by sector

Values and bases exactly as in Figures 1.1 and 2.1 · hover any point for both readings

Data table
Show the work — how to read the corners
Reading the map: the axes reuse Figures 1.1 and 2.1 unchanged — same numbers, same trackers, same caveats.1,6,7,9,12,19,21,23 Corner names are ours; positions are the trackers'. The honest note: retail shares the bottom-left corner with manufactured housing, and the difference between them is not on this chart — it is in the demand direction (retail absorption forecast third-lowest in a decade;22 manufactured-housing site rents +7.0% into a 7.2-million-home shortage23,26) and in which way each stock is drifting (retail demolishing toward balance;13 manufactured-housing communities losing sites to redevelopment against ~zero replacement — Figure 4.1 carries the closure record34,37).

Figure 3.2 · The verdicts

Six sectors, six sentences

The scoreboard in words — each verdict is the two axes plus the demand direction, with the sources doing the talking.

Manufactured-home communities

Quiet and full — and the quiet is structural.

≈0 new communities per year against ~43,000 standing;3,15 94.9% occupied;23 site rents +7.0% — with a 7.2M-home shortage underneath.23,26

Apartments

The wave worked — demand ate it.

Record 588,883 units delivered in 2024, 666,699 absorbed; occupancy back to 95.5%; rents flat at −0.2% while starts fall 73% from peak.1,5

Self-storage

Built through the boom; digesting now.

Stock grew 3.0% in 2025 vs. a 4.2% long-run average; same-store occupancy 92.5% at the largest operator; advertised rates −1.7% and stabilizing.6,19

Industrial

The record wave is clearing.

Deliveries fell from a record 609.6M sq ft (2023) to 1.6% of stock (2025); vacancy 6.9% and likely past its crest; rents +2.9%.7,8

Office

No cranes — and still no squeeze.

Pipeline −87% from its 2020 peak, completions 0.3% of stock — yet 20.1% stands empty and attendance runs ~54% of pre-pandemic.2,9,18

Retail

Tight because it shrank.

Availability 4.9% at record-adjacent lows — after 130M+ sq ft of demolition in five years and a decade of sub-0.5% supply growth; demand steady, not rising.21,13,22

The manufactured-housing anomaly

One distinction matters enough to state precisely: in manufactured housing, the homes are an industry, but the communities are a closed set. Factories still ship houses. Zoning has all but stopped shipping the land they sit on.

The homes flow is real and rebuilding: 102,738 new HUD-code homes were produced in 2025 — essentially level with 2024's 103,314 — double the 2009 trough of 49,700 and still 72% below the 1998 peak of 373,100.29,30 Those homes house about 7.2 million households — one occupied dwelling in twenty — and some 22 million Americans.31,32 The communities flow is the anomaly: roughly ten built in two decades,3 few since 2000,14 at least ten estimated lost to redevelopment every year,16 and the reason is administrative, not economic — the largest owner in the sector tells its shareholders every year that zoning approval is the barrier that will not move.25

And the door out of the stock is real. No agency counts park closures nationally — a 2024 Penn State Law Review study notes only Vermont and Washington even publish annual closure lists — but everywhere an official series exists, it runs one direction.34 Florida's Senate logged 263 parks closed between 1994 and 2006 — 24,613 homesites — and attributed the wave to the strength of the real-estate market;34 peer-reviewed research counted another 127 Florida parks permanently closed from 2012 to 2022, removing more than 6,000 units.35 Oregon's housing agency recorded 66 parks and 2,654 spaces closed from 1997 to mid-2009; Washington's Commerce Department logged eight parks closed in 2022 alone.34,36 The mechanism is what an appraiser would predict — communities on appreciating land get sold and redeveloped to what the dirt has become worth. Lument's research put it plainly: legacy communities "have been converted to higher value residential and commercial real estate purposes," and the national pad inventory is "shrinking on the margin."38 Marcus & Millichap's latest national survey found about half of surveyed metros lost homesites between 2023 and 2024.39 And because the inflow is as close to zero as an asset class gets — Freddie Mac's Duty to Serve plan counted 5,535 communities built in the 1970s, 478 in the 2000s, and 43 from 2010 to the plan's 2017 writing — every closure is a net subtraction.37

Figure 4.1 · The exit door

Communities leave the stock — and nothing replaces them

The inflow by decade, from Freddie Mac's Duty to Serve plan, next to the outflow where states actually count it. A pipeline that built five and a half thousand communities in the 1970s built forty-three in the 2010s — so the closures the official series record are permanent subtractions, concentrated where land values make redevelopment the higher use.

5,535 → 43
U.S. communities built in the 1970s vs. built 2010–2017 — the inflow, per Freddie Mac's Duty to Serve plan
263 + 127
Florida parks closed 1994–2006 (24,613 homesites, state Senate report) and 2012–2022 (6,000+ units, peer-reviewed) — one state, three decades, one direction
8 in '22
parks closed in Washington in 2022 alone, per the state Commerce Department — one of only two states that publish an annual closure list
Show the work — sources & the counterweights
Sources: inflow by decade and the 43-since-2010 count from Freddie Mac's Duty to Serve Underserved Markets Plan (manufactured-housing section, published 2017), which also notes Datacomp/JLT tracked 37,897 communities at the time;37 Florida 1994–2006 closures from the Florida Senate's Interim Project Report 2007-106 and Oregon's 1997–2009 closures from Oregon Housing and Community Services' 2011 annual report, both as documented in Baar, Penn State Law Review (2024);34 Florida 2012–2022 closures from Haas & Hepburn, Urban Studies (2025);35 Washington closures from state Commerce Department figures;36 conversion mechanism from Lument research and Marcus & Millichap's 2H 2025 national report.38,39
The counterweights, stated before anyone asks: there is no rigorous national closure census, and the honest national claim is flat-to-slowly-declining, not collapsing. A University of Colorado study of 2000s Houston found park parcel counts roughly constant — closures offset by openings on the urban fringe;40 Colorado's young registry shows counts rising as registration compliance improves; Northmarq's dataset shows supply roughly steady 2024 to 2025;23 and universe estimates differ enough (37,897 tracked by Datacomp vs. 43,000+ per MHI) that differencing two sources proves nothing.37,15 What the evidence does support: essentially zero inflow, well-documented redevelopment-driven exits wherever land appreciates, and official series that never once point up.

That is why the scoreboard's bottom-left corner is not a cyclical reading for this sector. Office earned its empty towers from a demand shock; apartments earned their fullness by building through one. Manufactured-home communities are full because demand for a $752-a-month homesite23 in a country short 7.2 million affordable rentals26 never stopped — and quiet because the supply response that ends every other real-estate cycle is not permitted to happen, while the exit door stays open.

Figure 4.2 · The homes still ship — the land does not

Thirty years of manufactured-home shipments

Census Bureau shipment data, 1995–2025. The industry that builds the homes fell 87% peak-to-trough and has climbed back to about a third of its 1998 pace. The industry that builds the communities effectively retired in 2000.

New manufactured-home shipments, thousands of units per year

U.S. Census Bureau, Manufactured Housing Survey (IBTS-compiled), 1995–2025 · hover for any year

373.1k
homes shipped in 1998 — the modern peak, before the sector's financing bust
102,738
homes produced in 2025 (HUD-compiled data) — a working industry at a third of its former pace
$84 vs $169
price per square foot, new manufactured home vs. new site-built home before land, 2024 — a gap the Census table shows holding near half for eleven straight years
Data table
Show the work — sources & the two flows
Sources: annual shipments from the Census Bureau's Manufactured Housing Survey time-series workbooks (compiled from manufacturers' reports to IBTS), 1995–2025; the 2025 total of 102,738 is HUD-compiled production reported by MHARR.29,30 Cost per square foot from the Census MHS "Cost & Size Comparisons" table, 2024: $84.45 manufactured vs. $168.86 site-built excluding land. The gap is not a one-year artifact: across the table's full 2014–2024 span the manufactured average ran $45.41 to $84.45 per square foot against $97.25 to $168.86 site-built — between 45% and 52% of the site-built figure in every one of the eleven years.27
Why this chart is here: shipments measure the homes. The investable scarcity is the land under them — communities — where the flow is the ≈0 of Figure 1.1. A reader should hold both: the product is abundant enough to house millions affordably; the platform it needs is the thing nobody is allowed to build. That pairing — not either number alone — is the thesis.

What the scoreboard says

Every sector answers two questions. Only one answers both the way an owner wants — and it is the one that is not allowed to change its answer.

Supply you cannot add

Apartments, storage and industrial pipelines all shrink when rates rise — and refill when they fall. The manufactured-housing pipeline is not cyclical; it is zoned shut, at roughly ten new communities in two decades.3,25,28

Demand you cannot remove

Office demand left with the commute. Housing demand cannot leave: a 7.2-million-home affordability shortage and a 2-to-1 cost advantage per square foot hold the floor under every occupied homesite.26,27

Pricing that shows both

Where supply met demand, rents went flat — apartments −0.2%, storage −1.7%. Where it never could, they did not: site rents +7.0%, on occupancy near 95%.1,6,23

Sources

  1. RealPage Analytics — market updates: 4Q 2024 (record 588,883 units delivered; 666,699 absorbed), 4Q 2025 (~409,500 delivered 2025), 2Q 2026 (occupancy 95.5%; effective rents −0.2% YoY), and "Over 1.1 Million More Occupied Apartment Units" (universe ~19.4M units). realpage.com/analytics/4q-2024-data-update · 4q-2025-data-update · 2q-2026-data-update · occupied-units-2024
  2. CBRE, "Q2 2026 U.S. Office Market Report" (July 29, 2026) — pipeline 15.4M sq ft, down 87% from its Q2 2020 peak, lowest since tracking began in 1990; vacancy 18.3%; ninth consecutive quarter of positive net absorption. cbre.com/insights/figures/q2-2026-us-office-market-report
  3. Nareit, "Favorable Supply Picture Boosts Manufactured Housing REITs" (April 20, 2017) — Ryan Burke, Green Street Advisors: "approximately 10 new manufactured home communities have been built in the United States in the past two decades." reit.com/news/articles/favorable-supply-picture-boosts-manufactured-housing-reits
  4. U.S. Census Bureau data via NAHB Eye On Housing — 608,000 multifamily units completed in 2024 (highest since 1986); 484,000 in 2025; multifamily starts 547,000 (2022) to 355,000 (2024). eyeonhousing.org (2024 completions) · (2025 completions) · nahb.org (starts)
  5. CoStar / Apartments.com — Q1 2026 construction update: starts ~55,000 units, down 73% from the early-2022 peak, lowest since 2011; under construction ~579,000, down 50%+ from the early-2023 peak. Q2 2026 vacancy update: national vacancy 8.2%. Q1 2026 construction update (Yahoo Finance syndication) · Q2 2026 vacancy update
  6. Yardi Matrix (self-storage) — Yardi Breeze, "The State of Self Storage in 2026" (Mar 20, 2026): 2025 new supply 3.0% of stock, 2026 forecast 2.4%, long-term average 4.2%; Yardi Matrix release (May 20, 2026): Q1 2026 starts down 29% YoY; Yardi Matrix release (July 29, 2026): advertised rates −1.7% YoY in June 2026. yardibreeze.com/state-of-self-storage-2026 · May 2026 release · July 2026 release
  7. Cushman & Wakefield, U.S. Industrial MarketBeat — Q4 2023 (record 609,626,928 sq ft delivered 2023); Q4 2025 (280,359,487 sq ft delivered 2025; inventory 18,024,889,918 sq ft); Q2 2026 (inventory 18,290,709,402 sq ft; vacancy 6.9%, likely past its cyclical peak; asking rents +2.9% YoY). Q4 2025 MarketBeat (PDF) · Q2 2026 MarketBeat (PDF)
  8. CBRE — "Q2 2026 U.S. Industrial & Logistics Market Report": completions 47.9M sq ft, lowest quarterly total since 2016; and "Higher Vacancy and Interest Rates Contribute to Less Industrial Construction" (Mar 2024): record ~612M sq ft delivered 2023, starts collapse. Q2 2026 report · Mar 2024 brief
  9. Cushman & Wakefield, U.S. Office MarketBeat Q2 2026 (July 2026) — inventory 5,419,515,073 sq ft; vacancy 20.1%; trailing-four-quarter completions 15.6M sq ft = 0.3% of inventory, a 14-year low; under construction 19.7M sq ft (~0.4% of inventory); total inventory shrank ~33M sq ft over five quarters; trailing-four-quarter absorption +14.3M sq ft, strongest since 2020. Q2 2026 Office MarketBeat (PDF) · July 17, 2026 release
  10. CommercialEdge (Yardi) via Commercial Observer (Jan 28, 2025) — 9.8M sq ft of U.S. office construction started in 2024; 2024 deliveries the lowest since 2013; pipeline below 1% of stock. commercialobserver.com
  11. CBRE data via CRE Daily (May 7, 2026) — U.S. retail construction completions of 4.7M sq ft in Q1 2026, the lowest quarterly delivery volume in two decades. credaily.com
  12. Cushman & Wakefield, U.S. Retail (Shopping Centers) MarketBeat Q2 2026 — inventory 4,198,665,002 sq ft; 2.3M sq ft delivered in Q2; pipeline less than 0.3% of existing inventory; vacancy 6.0% vs. a 7.4% historical average; H1 2026 deliveries 5,426,107 sq ft. Q2 2026 Retail MarketBeat (PDF)
  13. Colliers — "The Retail Shift" (May 2024): retail inventory growth under 0.5% annually for the past decade; 130M+ sq ft demolished over five years; retail space per capita 56.5 sq ft (2009) to 54.3 (2023); "2026 Retail Outlook" (Jan 2026): new construction projected to fall 37% in 2026. The Retail Shift · 2026 Retail Outlook
  14. Urban Institute, Urban Wire (Jan 29, 2018) — "few new manufactured home communities have been built since 2000"; localities often restrict placement outright; manufactured housing runs 35–47% cheaper per square foot than site-built. urban.org/urban-wire
  15. Manufactured Housing Institute — "Manufactured Home Communities in the U.S.": more than 43,000 communities representing almost 4.3 million homesites. manufacturedhousing.org
  16. Andrew Keel, Forbes Business Council (Dec 22, 2021) — industry estimate that at least ten communities are torn down and redeveloped each year; an operator's estimate, not independent research. forbes.com
  17. Moody's Analytics CRE via Bisnow (Apr 6, 2026) — U.S. office vacancy 21.0% in Q1 2026, an all-time record for its tracked set. bisnow.com
  18. Kastle Systems, Back to Work Barometer — 56.3% ten-city average for the week of Dec 8, 2025 (post-pandemic high); 54.4% for the week of Aug 10, 2026; measured against a pre-COVID badge-swipe baseline. kastle.com (Dec 2025) · kastle.com (current)
  19. Self-storage REIT Q2 2026 results — Public Storage 10-Q: same-store average occupancy 92.5%; Extra Space Storage: ending same-store occupancy 94.2%; CubeSmart: same-store occupancy averaged 90.4%, ending 91.0%. PSA 10-Q · EXR release · CUBE release (PDF)
  20. PwC & Urban Land Institute, "Emerging Trends in Real Estate 2026" — self-storage chapter (Marcus & Millichap): share of U.S. households renting storage rose from 11.1% (2022) to 13.4% (2024), the largest jump in the Self-Storage Association's recurring study, with 150M+ sq ft of net absorption over the span. pwc.com/emerging-trends
  21. CBRE, "Q2 2026 U.S. Retail Figures" (July 29, 2026) — retail availability unchanged at 4.9%; average asking rent +2.4% YoY. cbre.com/q2-2026-us-retail-figures
  22. CoStar Group (Feb 18, 2026) — U.S. retail vacancy peaking just under 4.4%; 2026 net absorption forecast ~16M sq ft, the third-lowest annual demand formation in the past decade. costargroup.com
  23. Northmarq, "Manufactured housing communities poised for growth in 2026" (Feb 17, 2026) — national MHC occupancy 94.9% in Q2 2025 (+10 bps YoY); average asking site rent $752/month, +7.0% YoY. northmarq.com
  24. Sun Communities, Form 10-K for FY2025 — MH and annual RV sites 97.9% occupied at December 31, 2025 (excluding transient RV). SEC EDGAR: sui-20251231
  25. Equity LifeStyle Properties — Form 10-K for FY2025 (barriers to entry: the most significant barrier remains the difficulty of securing zoning permits) and Q4/FY2025 results (Core MH average occupancy 94.3%; Core MH base rental income +5.5%). SEC EDGAR: els-20251231 · Q4 2025 results
  26. National Low Income Housing Coalition, "The Gap 2026" (Mar 5, 2026) — shortage of 7.2 million affordable and available rental homes for extremely-low-income renters; 35 affordable-and-available homes per 100 such households. nlihc.org
  27. U.S. Census Bureau, Manufactured Housing Survey — "Cost & Size Comparisons: New Manufactured Homes and New Single-Family Site-Built Homes, 2014–2024": 2024 average $84.45/sq ft manufactured vs. $168.86/sq ft site-built excluding land; average new MH sales price $123,300. census.gov: sitebuiltvsmh.xlsx
  28. Bipartisan Policy Center, "Zoning Reforms to Support Factory-Built Housing" (Sept 2024) — citing a Freddie Mac study of 825 jurisdictions in 32 states: 57% required lot sizes larger than half an acre for manufactured homes. bipartisanpolicy.org
  29. U.S. Census Bureau, Manufactured Housing Survey — "Shipments of New Manufactured Homes" time series (compiled from manufacturers' reports to IBTS): annual totals 1995–2025, including the 1998 peak (373,100) and 2009 trough (49,700). census.gov/mhs/shipments
  30. MHARR (Feb 3, 2026) — HUD-compiled 2025 production: 102,738 new HUD-code homes, −0.55% vs. 103,314 in 2024. manufacturedhousingassociationregulatoryreform.org
  31. NAHB Eye On Housing (Apr 3, 2025), from American Community Survey data — 7.2 million occupied manufactured homes, 5.4% of the occupied U.S. housing stock. eyeonhousing.org
  32. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development — "22 million people in the United States live in manufactured homes." hud.gov
  33. U.S. Census Bureau, New Residential Construction — annual housing units completed in buildings with five units or more, 1968–2025 time series ("Housing Units Completed," comps_cust.xlsx): 2011 trough 129,900; 2024 peak 591,700; 2025 467,700. census.gov/construction/nrc/data/series · comps_cust.xlsx
  34. Kenneth Baar, "Protections of (Im)mobile Home Owners from the Consequences of (Im)mobile Home Park Closures," Penn State Law Review, Vol. 128:3 (2024) — documents the Florida Senate Interim Project Report 2007-106 (263 parks / 24,613 spaces closed 1994–2006, attributed to the strength of the real-estate market), Oregon Housing and Community Services' 2011 annual report (66 parks / 2,654 spaces closed 1997–June 2009), that only Vermont and Washington publish annual closure lists, and that park construction "virtually ceased by 2000." pennstatelawreview.org (PDF)
  35. Jacob Haas & Peter Hepburn, "Eviction from manufactured home parks," Urban Studies (2025) — 127 registered Florida mobile-home parks permanently closed 2012–2022, removing more than 6,000 units; summarized by NLIHC. nlihc.org (summary)
  36. Washington State Standard (Oct. 26, 2023), figures attributed to the Washington State Department of Commerce — eight mobile-home parks closed in 2022 (133 families relocated); four closures through Oct. 2023. washingtonstatestandard.com
  37. Freddie Mac, Duty to Serve Underserved Markets Plan — manufactured-housing section (published 2017): communities built by decade (3,808 in the 1960s; 5,535 in the 1970s; 2,942 in the 1980s; 478 in 2000–2010; 43 since 2010), and Datacomp/JLT's tracked universe of 37,897 communities. sf.freddiemac.com (PDF)
  38. Lument (Daniel J. Hogan, Managing Director for Research), via REBusinessOnline (Sept. 22, 2021) — "the national pad inventory is shrinking on the margin"; legacy communities "converted to higher value residential and commercial real estate purposes." rebusinessonline.com
  39. Marcus & Millichap / Institutional Property Advisors, "2H 2025 Manufactured Housing National Report" — "about half of surveyed metros saw declines in total homesites from 2023 to 2024"; redevelopment pressure in urban areas. institutionalpropertyadvisors.com (PDF)
  40. Urban Institute, Housing Matters research summary of Esther Sullivan's Houston park-closure study (City & Community, 2017) — park parcel counts roughly constant year to year in 2002–2011 Houston, with closures concentrated where land was redeveloped. archive-housingmatters.urban.org
Written by Ryan Smith
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