Not surprisingly, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are financing this rental housing boom. I wrote recently, the GSEs made 53% of all apartment loans in 2016, down from their combined 68% market share in 2012. “So, their conservator, The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), recently eased the GSE’s lending caps so they can crank out even more loans.”

Mary Salmonsen writes for multifamilyexecutive.com, “Currently, Fannie and Freddie are particularly dominant in garden apartments [and] in student housing, with 62% and 61% shares, respectively. The two remain the largest mid-/high-rise lenders but hold only 35% of the market.”

Mr. Richter warns us, “Government Sponsored Enterprises such as Fannie Mae guarantee commercial mortgages on apartment buildings and package them in Commercial Mortgage-Backed Securities. So taxpayers are on the hook. Banks are on the hook too.”

But, for the moment, it’s build them and they will come; first renters, then complex buyers. Wall Street giant “The Blackstone Group acquired three Las Vegas Valley apartment complexes for $170 million, property records show,” writes Eli Segall for the Las Vegas Review Journal. “Overall, it bought 972 units for an average of $174,900 each.”

Sales like this has developers going as fast as they can. I heard an apartment developer say Vegas has at least four more good years left in this cycle and is scrambling for new sites. In the land of Starbucks, Microsoft and Amazon, it’s thought the boom will never end. Richter writes, “the new supply of apartment units hitting the market in 2018 and 2019 will even be larger. In Seattle, for example, there are 67,507 new apartment units in the pipeline.”

However, while no one was paying attention, “the prices of apartment buildings nationally, after seven dizzying boom years, peaked last summer and have declined 3% since,” Richter writes. “Transaction volume of apartment buildings has plunged. And asking rents, the crux because they pay for the whole construct, have now flattened.”

As usual, cheap money entices developers to over do it, and the fall will be just as painful.

Douglas French is former president of the Mises Institute, author of Early Speculative Bubbles & Increases in the Money Supply, and author of Walk Away: The Rise and Fall of the Home-Ownership Myth.