If you’ve kept up with your Austin luxury home builder’s blog posts recently, you can see a reoccurring theme. We are very interested in the local economy. We believe it is important to monitor your local economy just as much as you do the national economy because the different areas in the United States can sometimes be too diverse to generalize into one group. When you look at the national economy as an average of all the different metros, both high and low outliers have a much bigger impact on the average, especially when there are more low outliers than high. However, it’s never a bad thing for your local economy to be one of those high outliers, like Austin.
The Austin American Statesman came out with an article a few days ago, discussing Austin’s job growth. Over the past eight years, Austin has set the pace among the 50 largest metro areas in the nation in job growth. Since 2004, Austin has added 140,200 jobs representing a 21.3 percent increase, significantly larger than the second place Houston area which has only had 15.7 percent job growth, mainly due to the rise in the energy sector. That does not even include the 3,600 jobs Apple Inc. will bring as they set to expand to Austin.
The Austin employment base is projected to continue growth due partly to an organization called Opportunity Austin. The organization acts as a recruiter on Austin’s behalf to encourage companies to move to Austin, bringing with them jobs and city-wide economic stimulation. Since 2003, Opportunity Austin has raised more than $33 million to help businesses expand and open an office in Austin.
As companies continue to expand to Austin, the demand for homes will increase, helping to relieve some of the stress the custom home building industry has been suffering from. Leave us a comment to discuss how you like to interpret and evaluate the economy.