2018 Denver Economic Forecast

I attended Patti Silverstein’s 2018 Economic Forecast Lunch last week as I do every year and I sat in the front row like a good economics geek. LOL! Here is a sampling of what i learned—

• The St. Louis Fed forecasts there is <1% chance of a national recession this year.
• She is predicting that CO will add 50k new jobs this year and in metro Denver we will add 31,400 new jobs. This growth rate of 2% is our long-term average.
• We have 921k Sole Proprietor businesses in CO, which is 25.2% of our employment. Nationally this number is 22.6%.
• The fastest job growth sectors in 2017 will be IT/Software and beverage production.
• Wages in metro Denver increased 5.5% in the first 6 months of 2017!
• Aerospace employment in metro Denver is 4.5 times the national average.
• Consumer Confidence in CO increased a whopping 25% last year.
• According to an expert our commercial office space market is STILL in the beginning of an expansion phase.
• Last year builders completed 10 million square feet of office, industrial, and retail space! Patti said they may build 12 million square feet this year. I wish we could devote more of this energy into building single family homes.
• She is “hoping” that Denver home prices only rise by 5% this year; but she admitted that they will probably rise by more than 6%.
• I asked Patti, if our high home prices are impacting company’s moves to Denver? She said “yes, if they are moving from less expensive areas; but if they are moving from CA or NY they think our prices are great.”