DENVER (KDVR) — There are more apartments coming to the Denver metro, but they probably won’t have any impact on the area’s rental prices.

As of July 2022, there are 384,257 apartment units in the seven-county Denver metro area, according to a market report from the Apartment Association of Metro Denver. But in the near future, that number will grow substantially with 41,000 units currently under construction and another 62,000 in the planning stages.

Senior vice president Mark Williams said he believes this is a record number of apartment units in the works, but just because they’re in the works doesn’t mean they will come on the market at the same time. Williams estimates around 12,000 will be ready for occupancy this year. Those are unlikely to push rent down.

While 12,000 units is one of the highest numbers of new apartments historically, it is roughly equal to the amount that came into the market each of the last five years. Since 2017, the Denver metro has seen an average of 11,800 units come onto the market annually. These are also the years when metro rent rose the fastest and the highest on record.

The number of apartments hitting the market historically has little impact on rent prices.

The last five years have indeed seen more apartment units hit the metro market than any other time. Population booms in the mid-1980s and early 2000s coincided with robust apartment development, but only a few years between 2000 and 2015 produced more than 10,000 units.

Despite these big booms, the average rent has still gone up.

The Denver metro area’s quarterly rent nearly doubled between 2013 and the present, the fastest pace on record. Metro rent rose at its second-fastest rate between 1990 and 2000, a period when builders were also producing record numbers of apartments.