Redfish Emerging Markets is pleased to announced the initial posting of what will be a monthly feature - a summary from the Bureau of Labor Statistics of each state’s unemployment rate.  Here’s a link right to the free report.  We’ll be updating this report on or about the 20th of every month.

Following unemployment is critical in tracking the health and vitality of a real estate market, and we spend a great deal of time tracking and analyzing unemployment parameters in markets all around the country.  Following unemployment in your specific markets of choice is of course more important that looking at unemployment at the state level, however states that struggle with unemployment challenges tend to have multiple markets that are struggling, often due to commonalities in regional economics.  We’ll be looking at community / market unemployment rates in more detail in our newsletters every month, and we look at this data in critical detail in our market reports. 

After some debate over the past couple of years, we’ve chosen to follow a rolling six month average of unemployment rates (both by state and in each individual market) - it tends to level out some of the inevitable spikes or drops that occur due to variability in reporting, yet allows tracking of changing trends readily. 

This month - the top five states (lowest unemployment) are Idaho, Hawaii, Utah, S. Dakota, and Montana.

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