Again we had a very healthy response to the Prefio.com Quarterly Survey into employment prospects in property & construction – this time looking forward into the current quarter, Q1 of 2010.
A total of 1.205 property & construction professionals gave their views as to the overall employment health of the property & construction sectors in Q1 2010 of which 972 went on to give a more detailed view as to the prospects by specialism. Click on the graphic at the bottom of this post to see an enlarged copy of the graphical results.
To make sure that your views are included in the next set of survey results (for Q2, 2010) then make sure to take the 10 seconds to complete the survey here:
Commentary:
- Overall sentiment remains quite strongly negative, although the averaged “consensus” view has nudged slightly “less negative” to 3.8 on a 9 point scale, where 5 is “neutral”.
- Only 15% of respondents saw the overall employment prospects for the sectors as anything better than “neutral”.
- The most strikingly negative specialisms were “Construction” and “Planning, Design & Development”
- On average respondents felt more positive about the “Real Estate Legal” and “Real Estate Finance” specialisms with other specialisms (Asset Management and Corporate Real Estate) being slightly, although not markedly positive.
- Comments from respondents included:
- “Expect marked regional variations in fortunes”
- “A lot of conflicting signs – so maybe we are at a turning point”
- “I expect a slow recovery through 2010/11 but that won’t feed through into much better employment prospects”
- “Expect employers to be cautious in their employment decisions”
One shouldn’t really be surprised at this analysis. Real Estate is a lagging indicator to the economy, not a leading one. In our experience, property statistics tend to react to changes in the economy between 12 and 24 months later.
The only exception to this is the serviced office/business centre industry, which reacts more quickly owing to the short term nature of the licence agreements used by it, compared to the length of occupational leases.
We think that serviced offices lag the economy by around 6 months, which means that they in turn act as a leading indicator for conventional offices by 6 months to a year.