April 8, 2014 Real Estate Report - The Report We Have Been Waiting For

Friday's employment report has given us three things we have been waiting for. First, this jobs report was relatively good after a string of disappointments over the winter. It tells us that at least part of the slowdown was definitely due to the weather -- a question everyone has been asking. Secondly, the report contains another upward revision to the previous two months' of data. There were actually 37,000 more jobs created in January and February when compared to last month's release. That is a revision which we speculated could be coming. Finally, the economy has now recovered all of the millions of private sector jobs lost during the recession. That is a lot of jobs to recover and represents a very significant milestone. The problem is, it took the economy four years "post recession" to regain the jobs lost. During the recession and afterwards, the population has been growing. As reported by CNN/Money, Heidi Shierholz, a labor economist at the Economic Policy Institute, estimates that we need an additional five thousand jobs to reach a healthy pre-recession labor market. That is a long way to go and Federal Reserve Chairwoman Yellen said as much in testimony to Congress just a few weeks ago. What this means is that the economy is indeed recovering, but still painfully slow. We need a few more years of this level of growth to become healthy or we need for the recovery to accelerate. There is another piece of good news here. The better jobs report did not cause another increase in interest rates -- at least initially. Again, this is evidence that the markets believe we need even more good news. Keith Stewart 773-529-7000