Given this economy we decided to revisit where our resort home owners reside full time. Checking on their area of primary residence give us (and you), insight into the stability of their livelihood and likeliness of needing to sell a second home. Pennsylvania still lays claim to almost 80% of the home owners at both Hidden Valley and Seven Springs.
The areas surrounding Pittsburgh came in with the most concentrated numbers. So how stable is our area? From the Bureau of Labor Statistics comes a graph showing monthly average unemployment rates for all of the states through Feb 2009. According to the Center for Workforce Information & Analysis the unemployment rate for PA is at 7.25 with the US coming in at 7.85
Consider our neighboring states like Michigan with all of the GM manufactures scaling back employees. Or Ohio where the DHL company with 8,000 employees recently shut down their facility. What part of the economic mix would knock the wind out of our markets? We decided to do some investigating to see if we could uncover any interesting economic information!
Considering that both Hidden Valley and Seven Springs have aggressive new construction plans we decided to first investigate median household income. We narrowed our focus to the most populated zip code areas recorded as homeowners at the resorts. You'd never guess it but the number was under $50,000!! (Thanks to the US Census for the income stats.) These folks would be hard pressed to purchase second homes at either resort. But it made us wonder about the top employers in the state and where these buyers are coming from.
Here are the top 50 employers according to the Center for Workforce Information and Analysis (3rd quarter 2007). When we grouped them into categories that we thought would have the greatest potential for high income earners this is what they looked like. Health, Education, Finance, hummm all are on the governments help out list! We also found the 2007 Employment Stats.
Another site we found very intriguing is the Pennsylvania State of Innovation Site. If you click on the tab that states "KEY INDUSTRIES you'll find four categories including Life Sciences, Advanced Manufacturing and Materials, High Technology and Business Services. The map is interactive and there's much more info available here!
We only found good news for the future of our markets to remain relatively stable. Especially when compared to our neighboring states! Here's a video that was done for Pittsburghs 250th celebration last year. It offers insight into why our area is moving up in places to live!
Comments(0)