2015 surprises: office, industrial growth

As Wells Fargo Senior Economist Mark Vitner wound down his 2015 forecast Wednesday in Sarasota for the members of the Gulf Coast CEO Forum, he saved his headline news for last:
The biggest economic surprise in 2015 for Florida, Vitner predicted, will be “how substantially the single-family housing market will have rebounded and how office and industrial will have done as well as it did. We're going to see some great things in commercial and industrial.”

Altogether Vitner delivered an upbeat assessment of what to expect in 2015 in Florida, along the Gulf Coast and across the United States.

Vitner has tracked Florida's economy for 30 years, starting in 1984 with Barnett Bank in Jacksonville. Based now in Charlotte, N.C., he specializes in tracking U.S. and regional economic trends.

Vitner told the CEO Forum's members he expects Florida Gulf Coast University and the Southwest Florida International Airport to continue to be leading drivers of growth in Lee County and that Lee can be expected to grow more economically than its neighboring Southwest Florida counties in the coming five years.

Asked if Florida's economy will return to the patterns of late 1980s and 1990s growth, when Florida's economy was driven largely by population growth, Vitner said: “We're in a better place than that. We've had a lot of internal growth.” He pointed to a robust rebound on the Space Coast, where he says the aerospace industry is “better than it was in the 1980s.”

What's more, said Vitner, when you look at Florida's job growth in 2014 — not including the two giant sectors of tourism and retail — the state produced 2.7% growth versus 2% nationwide. Vitner says that number shows that Florida's economy is much more than tourism and retail trade.

Vitner noted that Sarasota County boosted employment 4.1% in 2014, or by 10,600 new jobs, while the Tampa market increased only 1%, “the notable laggard,” he said. Through 2015 and beyond, he said expects Miami-Dade and Orlando to continue to lead Florida's economic expansion, with international tourism, investment and flights driving growth.