Treasure Valley Pipeline Reaches 11,735 Units: Why Only 1,192 Are Actually Being Built

Industry pipeline reports show nearly 12,000 multifamily units planned across the Treasure Valley, and that figure has made some investors cautious about oversupply. We verified all 46 projects against city permit records. What we found reframes the question—but it does not eliminate the risk.

AT A GLANCE

• 46 multifamily projects are tracked across the Treasure Valley, totaling 11,735 units
• Only 1,192 units—approximately 10%—are actually under construction
• 7,864 units, or roughly 67% of the pipeline, are entitled but have no vertical construction
• Just 84 units delivered metro-wide in the first quarter of 2026, against approximately 885 units of net absorption
• Stabilized vacancy is approximately 5.4%, with effective rent growth of approximately 3.2% year over year

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A NOTE FROM NATALIE

We moved from San Francisco to Boise in 1995, when I was seven.

The first thing I noticed was pickup trucks. I had never seen one before. Not one. And there were so many of them that I figured I had something wrong about how people got around.

The second thing I noticed was that nobody drove a Mercedes. I actually asked my parents about that. I wasn't joking. I wanted to know where they were.

What I did not notice was that we were the ones who stood out. We were overdressed everywhere we went. In my first-day-of-school picture I am dressed for a wedding. Everyone else is in Wranglers. I am wearing silk.

My parents didn't laugh at the Mercedes question, which was nice of them. What they did instead was point out that I had landed on something worth paying attention to: what a place doesn't have will tell you more than what it does.

My mom sold investment real estate here from the mid-nineties until she retired in 2012. She used to come home from work and say there was gold dust in the air. What she meant was that this place was missing a lot of things, and somebody was going to build them. The clients who bought alongside her back then are multimillionaires now. Most of them have not sold, and many never will. Generational wealth.

So I grew up making lists of what Boise didn't have. My mom missed her Starbucks vanilla latte, so we went to the Flying M instead. Where do you buy a bagel? That one took seven years. Blue Sky Bagels opened in 2002, the first one in town, and I was thrilled.

My parents were making the same kind of list, and theirs mattered more than mine. Nobody here was doing professional property management. So in 1998 they started doing it, out of a basement in the Alaska Building at 10th and Main. We were down there three years.

Starbucks opened its first Idaho store that same year, at 17th and State.

Thirty years later, I still look at this market the same way. What is already here is easy to count. What isn't here yet is where the money is.

That is what this letter is about. Everybody is looking at the same pipeline number and seeing 11,735 units. We went looking for what is not in it.

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📊 WHAT THE PIPELINE ACTUALLY SHOWS

One of the projects on the list is going to be an aquarium.

Its 170-unit approval expired in 2025 and the owner has moved on to something else entirely. It is still sitting in the industry pipeline reports as 170 apartments. So are two other projects that no longer have any apartments in them—one swapped for single family homes last March, one that turned out to be for-sale townhomes all along.

That is 439 units of supply that exist only on a spreadsheet. We removed all three.

Here is how we found them. We tracked 46 multifamily projects across eight Treasure Valley submarkets and verified each one against City of Meridian and City of Boise permit systems, COMPASS entitlement records, and municipal planning files.

The pipeline divides into three very different categories:

• Under construction: 4 projects, 1,192 units. Building permits issued and vertical construction underway.
• In lease-up: 12 projects, 2,679 units. Delivered and currently leasing.
• Planned: 30 projects, 7,864 units. Entitled, approved or in active review—with no vertical construction started.

That third category is roughly 67% of the total. Permission to build is not a building. And permission expires.

We also reclassified seven other projects, including two that were listed as planned and are already under construction.

The lesson is not that the reports are careless. It is that a pipeline number is a snapshot of announcements, and announcements do not expire the way approvals do. They just sit there.

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🏗️ DELIVERIES HAVE SLOWED SHARPLY

This is the part that surprised us most.

Metro-wide deliveries have fallen from approximately 3,096 units in 2023 to just 84 units in the first quarter of 2026. Net absorption over the same quarter was approximately 885 units—the thirteenth consecutive quarter of positive absorption.

Stabilized vacancy sits at approximately 5.4%. Effective rent growth has returned to positive territory at approximately 3.2% year over year, with average effective rent at approximately $1,701.

This is a constructive picture for owners of existing, stabilized assets. It is a more complicated picture for anyone underwriting new construction, where costs, rates and a long entitlement-to-delivery timeline all still apply.

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🌱 WHERE THE PIPELINE IS CONCENTRATED

Boise and Meridian account for approximately 8,030 of the 11,735 tracked units—roughly 68% of the pipeline—and are now nearly tied in total volume.

Meridian's total is heavily weighted toward the long term. Approximately 3,336 of its 4,006 units are planned rather than building, and several represent master-planned projects on decade-long horizons.

Nampa and Caldwell together account for approximately 2,931 units. Smaller submarkets including Eagle, Kuna, Garden City and Star hold the balance.

As we noted in our last newsletter, this is why submarket selection matters. A regional pipeline number tells you almost nothing about what will actually lease against your building. The gap that matters is the one within a few miles of your front door.

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📊 THREE TAKEAWAYS FOR MULTIFAMILY INVESTORS

1. Underwrite to permits, not to plans

A project without a building permit is not near-term competition, but it is not permanently absent either. Entitlements can be extended, sold or activated when conditions change.

The useful discipline is to separate the pipeline into what is building, what is leasing and what is merely approved—and to assign different weight to each. Treating all three as equivalent supply overstates the near-term threat and understates the long-term one.

2. Verify project status independently

Aggregated pipeline reports are a reasonable starting point and a poor finishing point. In our review, three tracked projects no longer had an apartment component, and seven others required reclassification.

Municipal permit systems and entitlement records are public, current and free. For an investor evaluating a specific submarket, an afternoon of verification can meaningfully change the competitive picture.

3. Account for the full cost of occupancy

The rent a property advertises and the rent it actually collects are drifting apart. Mandatory monthly fees, utility billing structures and unadvertised concessions can each move real revenue by a meaningful margin—and none of them show up in an asking-rent survey.

Understanding the complete rent-and-fee structure of directly competing properties—not their headline asking rents—is what produces operating assumptions that survive lease-up.

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🎯 THE BOTTOM LINE

The Treasure Valley pipeline is smaller in the near term than the headline figure suggests. Only about 10% of tracked units are under construction, deliveries have slowed dramatically, and absorption has been positive for thirteen consecutive quarters.

That is a genuinely constructive environment for well-positioned existing assets.

It is not an invitation to relax. Those 7,864 entitled units can activate quickly when capital gets cheaper, and the spread between advertised rent and collected rent is widening.

My mom was looking for what this valley did not have yet. Thirty years later the exercise is the same, just inverted: figure out what is not really coming, and you will know what you are actually competing against.

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📩 EVALUATING A TREASURE VALLEY MULTIFAMILY OPPORTUNITY?

Whether you are underwriting an acquisition or evaluating the performance of a property you already own, the right operating assumptions matter.

Commercial Northwest can help you:

• Validate achievable rents and operating assumptions
• Identify overlooked risks and performance opportunities
• Develop a realistic management, transition or stabilization strategy

If you are evaluating a Treasure Valley acquisition—or want to know whether your current property is positioned to capture this growth—we would be happy to provide a complimentary Idaho Multifamily Asset Review.

REQUEST A COMPLIMENTARY ASSET REVIEW

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P.S. If you own or are buying in the Treasure Valley, send me your address and I will tell you exactly what is actually under construction within three miles of it. Not what is announced. What has a permit. It takes me about an hour and there is no charge.

P.P.S. Here is the link to the full report! Enjoy! CNW_Treasure_Valley_Pipeline_Q3_2026_INVESTOR.pdf​

Warmly,
​Natalie Lemas Hernandez​
CEO | Commercial Northwest Property Management

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