By Tom Flanigan
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/wfsu/local-wfsu-982764.mp3
Tallahassee, FL – While Florida job growth was essentially flat in July, there are still reasons for economic hope. Tom Flanigan reports a number of key indicators have been staging a comeback in the Sunshine State.
Let's start off with what's going on with Florida's largest business. That would be tourism. For this year's second quarter, April, May and June, that business was up. The number of visitors coming to Florida during that period topped $21 million -- an increase of almost seven percent over the same time a year ago. Those numbers come from Visit Florida, the state's tourism marketing corporation where Will Seccombe is the chief marketing officer.
"Oh, it's fantastic news and it's been very encouraging since about February. We've seen real significant growth in visitors to the state and most importantly, growth in our market share of global travel, so we're seeing more growth in Florida than the rest of the country and the rest of the world."
Seccombe says the numbers are good across the board. Visitors from other U.S. states, some eight-five percent of the total, grew by more than five percent. Overseas visitors jumped by some seventeen percent and the number of Canadian visitors soared by more than 18-percent. And more than half of resident Floridians took in-state vacations in the second quarter. But, in the era of "jobs, jobs, jobs" the most impressive number is tourism related- employment for the quarter. Seccombe says it outpaced the same time a year ago by four percent. That's growth of nearly forty-thousand jobs.
"Florida hospitality industry has seen the growth and there's a remarkable correlation between the number of visitors to the state and the number of Floridians employed in the hospitality industry and that's a great model. I mean, every 85 visitors to Florida creates one Florida job."
There are now more than a million of those jobs all over Florida. And tourism touches many other parts of the Florida economy. Take retail clothing sales, for instance. More Florida visitors mean more Florida sales, says Linda Heasley, president and CEO of nationwide women's clothing chain The Limited.
"So much of Florida is based on tourism and we know when tourism takes a hit, our Florida stores do experience challenges as well. But I think what we're finding is that a lot of our customer is still working and she still needs to have appropriate clothing."
Heasely says her company is confident there's a good future in Florida. So much so, The Limited is re-opening stores in many secondary markets it abandoned a dozen years ago. That cautious optimism is echoed by Rick McAllister who heads the Florida Retail Federation.
"It has not been a v' shaped recovery, but it has been a very slow but steady recovery that over the last year-and-a-half or so, we have had fair increases every single month."
Then there's the sector whose collapse triggered so much other economic misery in Florida over the past three years. That is the real estate market. Marla Martin with Florida Realtors says this July saw a strong rebound.
"We had a 12-percent increase in existing condo sales statewide and a 12-percent increase in existing home sales, which follows a trend that we've been seeing pretty much for the last six months or so."
Also good news, Martin says, is that Florida real estate prices have leveled off. Statewide, home prices are holding steady with an average home price of almost a $137,000.
"You are seeing sales becoming stable and price becoming stable and that's very very encouraging in terms of the economy and Florida's future."
Still too early to tell if the worst is truly over, Martin says, but all this is certainly an improvement over the relentlessly bad economic news Floridians have been hammered with over the past few years.