By Kristena Hansen | Phoenix Business Journal
Both commercial real estate and housing in Arizona clearly have been picking up steam, but until improvements in the nation’s overall economy and employment shift from subpar to above average, another market boom still is several years away.
That was the overall conclusion local economists John Lucking and Elliott Pollack made to an audience of several hundred people at the Urban Land Institute’s eighth annual “Arizona Trends Day” event on Feb. 12 in downtown Phoenix. They described the economic recovery as a “mixed bag” of pros and cons, tying big-picture facts back into what it means for the real estate sector in which Arizona has relied heavily on for decades.
They said that while the nation’s debt, jobs, consumer confidence and gross domestic product have improved, the progress hasn’t been nearly enough to take a real bite out of the still-lingering economic woes. Metro Phoenix, in particular, has only gained about 40 percent of the 234,000 jobs it lost from peak to trough, and it’s hard to say when the population growth that Arizona so desperately needs will pick up again, they said.
As a result, real estate holdings nationwide still are down 20 percent from the pre-recession peak, said Lucking, president of Phoenix-based economic consulting firm Econ-Linc Ltd.
“I don’t care how good your individual project is, when the world hits the fan, you’re going to have some problems,” Lucking said in his opening remarks.
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