Here's an
unfortunately downbeat article on the state of the office vacancy rate in the Calgary Herald. At current absorption rates, they say we may not see a new office tower built until 2029. It strikes me as a bit alarmist, but at the same time we all know things are grim. The vacancy rate is pegged at 24% and that's still without Brookfield and Sky. Things will likely be quiet on the office side for some time. If Sky is any example though, I hope we see more mixed use in the future though.
I've updated some of the tables with LFS data from May. Things are looking better provincially than the are locally. The unemployment rate remains above 9% as it has for almost a year now. It's been relatively flat since the gains made largely in Q4 of 2016. As always there's more to it that than that. And thankfully it isn't all bad.
Calgary's participation rate remains sky high. We do really well as a province. For perspective, the national rate has hovered between 61% and 62% for the same time period as my data set. People want to work around here I guess. And where there's a will, there will eventually be a way.
Despite the high unemployment figure, Calgary actually still maintains the highest employment rate in my set as well, though Edmonton has made some recent major gains. It's nice to see that these percentages have been climbing pretty consistently for almost a year now.
So what's driving the increases? Well for one thing, population has continued to grow. Statcan's estimates say Calgary's working population (those aged 15+) has grown by over 100,000 people in the last three and a half years. And by an eye test, it appears that growth has accelerated slightly in the past 3 or 4 months.
Couple that with the sky high participation rate and you have an overall labour force that's grown by 80,000.
The number of employed persons is nearly equal to the peak for the observational period. This is just an assumption, but that may be the all time peak. Obviously, there has to be a question of what kind of jobs people are finding. And the answer can't be that they're the same ones as before. Because as the article points out, if the 40,000 downtown office jobs were back, the vacancy rate would be down. I don't think that bears in mind the relocation of Imperial oil out of downtown though, which also occurred during the observational period. So people may not be finding the same jobs, in the same places and likely not with the same pay, but I can't answer that definitively with the data I've got. Maybe I'll poke around for some salary statistics in the future.
It sucks to end on a bit of a downer. Lots of other key factors have turned corners, but not unemployment itself. The Unemployment line for Calgary looks a heck of a lot like the Unemployment Rate line. Meaning, unemployment growth has kept in pretty close step with labour force growth.
I do have something new that I'm very happy to share. I've found a new table which has the Part-Time/Full-Time divide at the CMA level. It's only available in an unadjusted seasonal figure so it isn't quite apples-to-apples with the rest of the data I've presented, but it does show the general trend. Over this time period, Full-Time and Part-Time employment have a pretty high negative correlation of -0.62. Meaning the numbers often move in opposition to one another. It's been pretty flat over the past 3.5 years, but lately there's been a move back towards Full-Time Employment.
