Just like a recipe in the kitchen, adding jobs, mixing in wage increases while monitoring inflation gives a pretty good idea of the end results. Jobs are everything to an economy.
As usual, I invoke the TINSTAANREM axiom — There Is No Such Thing As A National Real Estate Market or a National Economy. The same is true regarding job growth. It varies from location to location and also at specific locales over time.
Job growth for the top-40 MSAs and Divisions ranked by percentage increase with the largest percentage for the 12-months ending March 2019 are shown in the table. The analysis is based on seasonally adjusted data as provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In comparison, the U.S. posted a 1.71 percent gain in the same period. There are recurring themes continuing throughout these top performing MSAs: energy, tech, travel destinations, college towns, government, retirement locations and manufacturing.
In every segment of the economy are both over-performers and underperformers. The next table shows the 40 markets with the greatest percentage of job losses in the 12-months ending March 2019.
The next table shows the 20 MSAs (excluding Divisions and CMSAs) that created the greatest number of net new jobs in the prior 12-months. Naturally, the largest cities tend to have the greatest gains in jobs, but the percentage increase may or may not be that stellar. The New York MSA, for example, is the largest in the country and has almost 10 million total jobs. But the job growth rate at 1.35 percent is less than one-half the Dallas MSA and just greater than one-third the impressive 3.56 percent growth rate of Orlando.
Click here for a PDF including respective job performance for all 436 MSAs and Divisions sorted by state. Also included are job growth rates for the prior two-, five- and 10-years.
JOBS ARE EVERYTHING when it comes to the economy and the resulting demand for real estate. Period.
Ted