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While the overall economic climate in the electrical market still seems a bit unsettled, some local market areas are bucking the national trend and show great promise for the rest of 2016 and over the next few years.
Electrical Marketing’s editors took a crack a picking the nation’s 50 fastest-growing Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) (see chart on page 2), based on our new Key Electrical Market Indicators (KEMIs). To come up with the fastest-growing metros, we analyzed economic data on building permits per 1,000 residents; population growth from 2010 to 2015; changes in unemployment rates year-over-year; increases in employment in the construction and manufacturing industries; and data on Gross Metropolitan Product (GMP). We looked at more than 370 MSAs and whittled down our list to the markets that were showing the greatest combined year-over-year growth with these indicators.
Our ranking on page 2 shows clusters of growth along the coasts, in the Sunbelt and Intermountain States. When it comes to fast growth, it’s a world of “haves and have nots,” and 32 of the MSAs on the list are in just nine states — California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, North Dakota, Oregon, Utah, Texas and Washington.
EM will be publishing these rankings on a regular basis, and will be fine-tuning the selection process and the data. In the future, we will use three-month moving averages to analyze growth trends, and include electrical market potential for the contractor and industrial markets.
The MSAs were selected based on where they ranked in their percent change year-over-year with seven key drivers of market potential: Housing permits per 1,000 residents; construction and manufacturing employment; population growth; unemployment levels; and Gross Metropolitan Product. Data through May, 2016, with the exception of population.