Help Wanted: On Its Way

The business card printers are going to be busy. Marcus & Millichap managing partner Hessam Nadji predicts some 77k jobs  will be added  this year and another 82k  next year.

Hessam spoke last week at the DFW Investor Symposium at the Westin Galleria telling us that between 2010 to 2015, forecasts call for more than a half-million jobs to be added in the DFW metro and about the same in Houston, double the national average. Another important driver in Dallas over the next five years is the population boom: 864k new residents (about 750k new arrivals for Houston). The biggest benefit of this for Texas is the growth of people aged 20 to 34. Young adults will increase by 169k by 2015, which bodes well for long-term growth.

Hessam (second from left, with the M&M dream team: Dallas regional manager Tim Speck, managing director (NE, SE, and Texas offices) Gene Berman, and Fort Worth regional manager Dave Luther) says Texas is about to enter an economic expansion with an empty construction pipeline, which he says happens about every 24,000 years. The next two years will be fantastic for the market, but after that it's a matter of where can you build. In Texas, he says oversupply is a problem, but he's hoping this cycle will be different.

Developers have started building apartments, but many won't be completed until 2012. For Dallas, it's harder to add new product (although we're ahead of Houston for becoming more supply constrained), he says. But, he'll still pick Dallas  as the No. 1 metro in terms of long-term outlook for Texas markets. (In addition to the good news, we'd also like to thank M&M for being a valued sponsor.)