Sometimes it seems as if the country’s recovery would move faster if the government didn’t keep getting in the way.
The national unemployment rate fell to 7.7 percent in February, the lowest its been in four years. That’s good news for commercial real estate professionals. The industry needs confident consumers.
Cassidy Turley recently released its March 2013 Employment Tracker white paper, a document that analyzes the relationship between the country’s employment statistics and the commercial real estate market.
Not surprisingly, Cassidy Turley researchers found plenty to be happy about regarding the nation’s employment picture. But they also found cause for concern.
That seems to be the standard recipe for today’s economic news: a mix of optimism and pessimissm.
On the positive side, Cassidy Turley researchers pointed to the 100,000 new office-using jobs created in February. That’s a particularly good sign for the struggling office sector and is the most such jobs created since September of 2011.
Retail jobs also saw a boost, rising by 23,000 in February. Again, that’s good for the commercial real estate industry because it signals a possible increase in consumer spending.
At the same time, Cassidy Turley reported, investment sales volume rose by $105 billion in the fourth quarter of 2012. That’s the highest for any fourth quarter since 2007.
Not all the news is good, though. There’s the sequester, for one thing. As Cassidy Turley reports, the Congressional Budget Office predicts that the sequester will cost 750,000 jobs U.S. jobs in 2013. That could lead to government contractors abandoning 19 million square feet of office space.
The hope among Cassidy Turley researchers is that Congress will somehow manage to avoid a complete government shutdown at the end of March. If that happens, the sequester will run three or four weeks and long-term budget reduction measures will take effect. According to Cassidy Turley, this scenario will put the county on schedule for 1.9 million net new jobs in 2013.
As Cassidy Turley researchers say, this is not quite as many new jobs as we’d all like. But it is solid job growth nonetheless.
