Home transactions may be down, but you wouldn’t know it from most brokerage payrolls. Real estate hiring churned along in July, according to new data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
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Real estate hiring continued to defy the low-transaction environment last month, with payrolls softening in homebuilding but beefing up among brokerages and residential construction contractors.
The offices of real estate brokers, agents and property managers added 11,000 jobs between June and July, which is considered a 4,500-worker increase after accounting for normal seasonal patterns, according to the latest report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
This 0.2 percent seasonally adjusted increase in brokerage and property manager payrolls exceeded that of the broader U.S. economy, which recorded a seasonally adjusted increase of 187,000 private non-farm jobs.
Job growth continues to decelerate nationwide even as it remains strong from a historical standpoint.
“July’s jobs report shows us what we already knew — the labor market is cooling, but doing so very slowly,” First American Economist Ksenia Potapov said in a statement. “Employment gains are slowing, yet wages are still growing quickly. The pace of cooling may accelerate following the latest Fed hike, but it is too early to tell.”
Real estate employer payrolls were up 2.1 percent year over year in June, compared to 2.2 percent year-over-year growth for all U.S. nonfarm payrolls. The similarity is notable given how hard real estate has been hit by a falloff in home transactions and uncertainty in home prices and mortgage rates.
In residential construction, results were a bit more mixed. Homebuilders trimmed 2,500 jobs from their payrolls in July, a month when they typically add…