Austin's Economy On the Up!

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday [subs. required] that Austin's economy has again picked up, bringing with it a flood of real estate developers and investors:

The rebound comes after the Texas capital lost about 31,000 jobs from the end of 2000 through the close of 2003, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as high-powered tech employers such as Dell Inc. slashed payrolls and some smaller Internet start-ups fizzled. The tech bust also left one downtown office building abandoned midconstruction and put the local housing market on the sidelines during the residential boom.

Nearly all sectors of the real-estate market are enjoying the upswing, although the median home price of $167,100 in the third quarter was still about 23% below the national median, according to the National Association of Realtors. Apartment and warehouse vacancies also declined, though a slew of new developments sent retail economic vacancies soaring even as rents rose. Investors also are betting that demand for office space will follow the job growth. Sales of office buildings have surged with about $714 million in properties trading hands this year through October, up from last year ...

Several of our largest tech companies, which anchor the job market as fully one-tenths of our working population are engineers, have been steadily adding open-job requests at an average rate of roughly 1.9% - a clip higher than the national average of 1.6%. Another factor cited by the WSJ is our increasing status as a music meccas, the two factors causing our population to expand enormously as of the latest U.S. Census findings: