Strong market conditions helped fuel a 6 percent increase in multifamily lending in 2017 as lenders provided a record high $285 billion in new mortgages for apartment buildings with five or more units, the Mortgage Bankers Association reported today.

"The multifamily lending market in 2017 benefited from improving fundamentals, rising property values and low interest rates," said MBA Vice President of Commercial Real Estate Research Jamie Woodwell. "The result was larger loan sizes and record levels of overall borrowing and lending."

Confidence in the multifamily housing market edged down in the second quarter of 2018, according to the Multifamily Production Index (MPI) released today by the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB). The MPI dipped two points to 51 compared to the previous quarter.

The MPI measures builder and developer sentiment about current conditions in the apartment and condo market on a scale of 0 to 100. The index and all of its components are scaled so that a number above 50 indicates that more respondents report conditions are improving than report conditions are getting worse.