Payroll Jobs, Rents

Each day the Research staff takes a look at recently released economic indicators, addressing what these indicators mean for REALTORS® and their clients. Today’s update highlights payroll jobs and rents.

• Blockbuster job gains in December. According to Macroeconomic Advisers, using private company payroll data, there were 325,000 net new jobs added in the past month in the private sector. This outsized monthly job gain is one of the largest monthly tallies in over a decade. Over the past 12 months, 2.2 million private sector jobs were added to the economy according to this data.
• The ‘official’ job data comes out tomorrow from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which has different computational methods than above and would factor in government jobs. Based on recent trends of job shedding at the state and local governments (though not at the federal level), overall government employment is expected to have fallen by 20,000 to 30,000 jobs in December.
• Separately, the number of people filing for unemployment checks for the very first time fell in the latest week to 372,000. After having been above 400,000 on weekly claims for the past 3 years, it is welcoming to see the declining trend to comfortably below that level.
• In good news, REIS indicated this morning that the apartment vacancy rate fell to the lowest level in 10 years. REIS expects continued firming up in rents.