The economic fall-off of the past two years has likely bottomed out, but the fall-out hasn’t been fully felt, and the coming rebound is likely to be slow in taking shape. That was the message delivered by a panel of experts to the 250 attendees of NAIOP New Jersey’s Annual Meeting and Real Estate Forecast .
Locally, Patrick O’Keefe, director of economic research for J.H. Cohn, applauded NAIOP New Jersey’s advocacy in Trenton for its impact on getting measures passed that helped stabilize the industry.
In the larger sense, “a recession technically ends when things stop getting worse but they’re not necessarily getting better,” O’Keefe explained. “GDP grew in the third quarter of 2009, and other indicators are trending upward. But the problem is that we’re still losing jobs.”
How will recovery proceed? “Because it was largely caused by a financial crisis, we expect it to happen slower and take longer than past recessions,” O’Keefe predicted. “For non-residential real estate, 2010 will not be a good year because of the slow job growth. Employment will be the driver for what those in commercial real estate want to do.”
And for New Jersey in particular, he predicted a similar scenario of rising GDP but lagging employment, with non-residential construction lagging throughout the year.
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