TX CRE Brief: August 5, 2022
Oh where, oh where has my lost content gone???
This week’s newsletter includes:
1) What Happened to Previous Posts?
2) The Texas Economy
1) What Happened to Previous Posts?
As many of you know, we’ve had some issues with our hosting company throughout the year. The straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back was the loss of nearly a year’s worth of uploaded data. Looks like most of the issues have been remedied at this point. Unfortunately, they’ve informed us that all 2022 webpages have been lost and will need to be re-built. Even with our backed-up data, it would be an arduous and time-demanding task to re-build. So, as of this point TX CRE Brief will go-forward with fresh data and information on a bi-weekly basis. Thanks for your patience and understanding.
2) The Texas Economy
What’s the old line? The opportunity of a lifetime comes along everyday as long as you have enough ready cash to deploy! It’s yet to be seen how everything will shake out in the lead-up to the mid-terms and beyond, but for a good review of what is going on in Texas, the Texas A&M Real Estate Research center is a great place to start. Here’s a few important points from its just released “Outlook for the Texas Economy” which looks at May 2022 data.
The Texas economy continues to expand with the Dallas Fed’s Business Cycle Index reporting 10.2 percent positive growth for May. However, this number has been moving downward with Austin’s local index falling by 142 basis points. Dallas remains strong at 15.6 percent and is the only major metro above it’s year ago performance.
The Texas leading Economic Index edged down for the second straight month. This ends the continued post-pandemic expansion shown by the index.
Texas Consumer Confidence is down with recession fears the main reason.
Monetary policy will bring tightened money flows with the Fed spiking the fed fund rate. More increases seem to be on the horizon.
TX labor demand is strong with 74,200 jobs added in May which is higher that pre-pandemic levels. May unemployment in TX declined to 4.2 percent, and labor force participation increased slightly to 63.7 percent. Austin leads the way with a 2.9 percent unemployment rate with San Antonio at 3.8, North Texas at 3.6, DFW at 3.7, and Houston at 4.7 percent.
Manufacturing in TX added over 16,000 employees to the sector with an increase of average hourly earnings as well.
Construction payrolls expanded by over 10,000 jobs which is the highest monthly increase of the year.
The service sector added 58,000 employees with accommodation and food service leading the way at 26,000 with professional/scientific/technical services with 7,600.
For more in depth information on these topics and more, please visit the Texas A&M Real Estate Research Center. A download of the full report can be found there as well.
THANK YOU
I hope you enjoyed this week’s TX-CRE-Brief. If you see something that might be of interest and should be included in a future brief, please send it along via DM on LinkedIn or by e-mail to TX.Sales.Leadership@pm.me.
And please, by all means, support the sources I link to above.
Thanks everyone!