SEATTLE — Bentall Kennedy plans to break ground by June on a 654-unit luxury-apartment complex in downtown Seattle, a $200 million wager by the real estate firm that it will be cheaper to build than buy as the foreclosure crisis drives up demand for rental properties.

The project, at Sixth Avenue between Lenora and Blanchard Streets, will be the first apartments the company has built in the city in 10 years, said John Parker, president of the U.S. arm of Toronto-based Bentall Kennedy. The firm oversees $23 billion of real estate.

“There will be a spike in rents over the next one to three years,” Parker said in an interview at the company’s U.S. headquarters in Seattle. “It’s in anticipation of the spike in rents that we can be comfortable on our return on costs. A few years ago, we couldn’t do that.”

Companies like Parker’s and AvalonBay Communities Inc., the second-biggest publicly traded U.S. apartment owner, are stepping up new rental construction as vacancy rates fall and building costs hold steady. Starts on multifamily homes, including townhouses and apartments, jumped 78 percent in January from the previous month to an annual pace of 183,000, the highest since February 2009, the Commerce Department said Wednesday. Work on single-family houses decreased 1 percent.

The producer price index for construction materials rose 4.9 percent in January from a year earlier, while the PPI for new office buildings — the best proxy for luxury apartments — gained 0.4 percent, according to Associated General Contractors of America, a trade group based in Arlington, Va. The PPI for office buildings reflects finished projects and includes contractors’ bids.

“Materials costs are rising, but contractors aren’t pushing them through because they’re bidding so fiercely to get work that they’re offering to deliver the building at the same price as a year ago,” said Ken Simonson, chief economist of the contractors’ trade group. “The trend throughout 2010 was for these bid prices to stay pretty flat or even drop.”