Erhardt sees distant end to recovery

Talk about being bullish on Tampa Bay. Cushman & Wakefield Executive Director Bruce Erhardt, in his first quarter Land Market Overview newsletter to clients and investors, contends the region's commercial real estate recovery won't peter out anytime soon.

“I'm still predicting the overall Tampa Bay land cycle has five to six years left, with solid growth for the next three years,” Erhardt writes.

Really? Economic recoveries historically last six to seven years before they run out of steam. If Erhardt is right, the current recovery will run 12 or 13 years.

Erhardt notes that's happened before.

“We had a land growth cycle that began in 1993, and it lasted until 2008,” he says. “That's 14 years. And during the dot.com recession, America experienced a downturn, but we didn't have a recession here. So the country may experience a recession, but it may not happen here.”

He also says that while federal analysis had the last recession ending officially in 2009, the Tampa Bay area really didn't enter recovery mode — at least for land -- until 2012.