Published: San Antonio Express-News
By: David Hendricks
Date: March 10, 2011

The San Antonio metro area saw stronger job growth in the last half of 2010 than previously reported, lifting the net job gain for the year to about 8,000 instead of 7,000, state figures released Thursday show.

“The revisions were stronger than we thought,” said Travis Tullos, regional economist with Austin-based Texas Perspectives Inc., quoting numbers released by the Texas Workforce Commission.

The job gain rate is well below the 30,000 net job gain in 2006, but it helps erode the 23,000 jobs that were lost in 2009, according to Tullos' last quarterly report for the Greater San Antonio Chamber of Commerce.

The 30,000 net job gain in 2006 was driven mostly by housing and commercial real estate construction, Tullos said. “We're not going to see anything like that for three or four years,” he said.

San Antonio continues to outperform all other large Texas cities, according to a combination of economic measures that Texas Perspectives uses to gauge economic trends. The business cycle index uses sales tax, jobs, residential permits and house prices.

San Antonio sales tax revenues rose 6.2 percent in 2010, more than making up a 5.2 percent decline in 2009 from the previous year.

Tourism, combining room demand with revenues, grew 15.2 percent in 2010. The local industry suffered a decline in 2009 of 5.8 percent.

Rental revenues for San Antonio-area commercial properties are growing at a 2 percent rate, Tullos said. In the first quarter of 2007, rental revenues spiked at about 11 percent.

Tullos and chamber President and CEO Richard Perez stressed job growth is hampered by both the reluctance of small businesses to add positions and by the loss of companies that closed because of the 2007-09 recession.

“It's easier for existing employers to add jobs,” Perez said. “Creating a business is hard. We need a national policy to bring small businesses back.”

Tullos stressed that global economic growth, led by Asian giant China and by emerging countries such as Indonesia, are improving the U.S. economic mood.

“The global picture is reassuring. The stock market is reacting to that instead of the U.S. housing market,” he said.

Tullos' report refrained from predicting 2011 hiring and other economic results.

Perez did predict, however, that San Antonio will see strong tourism demand during Spring Break weeks this month, partly because people will not travel to Mexico because of that country's security image.

Long-term investments in oil-and-gas drilling in South Texas' Eagle Ford shale areas will have a prolonged spillover effect on San Antonio, Tullos said.

Professional and technical support activities for drilling have become high-tech, but they still must be close to the drilling sites. “Engineers will move from Houston to San Antonio,” Tullos said. “We'll see that category grow.”