Investors spent a record $240 billion on apartment buildings in 2021

Encouraged by high inflation, strong employment, and wage growth, investors have poured hundreds of billions of dollars into multifamily deals with expectations that apartment rents and asset prices will continue to rise.More than $240 billion worth of apartment buildings were sold in 2021 through November, a record that is 63% more than the dollar volume of deals done in all of 2020, according to data from Real Capital Analytics.Buyers have varied from major Wall Street firms and institutional players such as Blackstone to new entrants like Adam Neumann, the ousted founder of the coworking company WeWork, who was recently revealed to have joined with former WeWork colleagues to purchase about $1 billion of apartment buildings in the southern US."There's no hotter property type than multifamily right now from a sheer volume standpoint," said Aaron Jodka, a research director at Colliers International who estimated that 2021's total deal activity could surpass $270 billion — 40% higher than the previous record year, 2019.The Southwest and Southeast have attracted an outsized share of the investment activity, as the pandemic has untethered millions of Americans, freeing many to migrate to sunnier and more affordable locations.Dallas, Atlanta, Phoenix, Houston, and Los Angeles were the top five investment markets, in that order, in 2021, according to RCA, together accounting for more than $50 billion worth of transactions.The surging interest in apartment buildings has been easy to overlook as other property types have grabbed headlines in a real-estate market that has been reconfigured by the pandemic.Once-lowly warehouses, for instance, boomed as demand grew for storage and logistics spaces in an increasingly e-commerce-driven economy.