Salt Lake City – October 18, 2016 – The U.S. financial services industry, faced with heightened regulations and competition for skilled labor from technology companies, increasingly is finding the workers it needs by expanding to cities like Salt Lake City, according to a new report from CBRE Group, Inc.
CBRE found that less expensive, “active” markets have posted significant growth in financial services employment since 2010. The “active” markets that have above-average growth in financial-services employment, according to the CBRE report, are:
San
Antonio Columbus,
Ohio
Nashville Phoenix
Dallas/Fort
Worth Jacksonville,
Fla.
Salt Lake City Tampa
Richmond, Va. Charlotte
“New economic realities, continued regulatory pressure and the threat of technology disruption are unrelenting forces driving changes in the financial services industry,” said Julie Whelan, CBRE’s Head of Occupier Research in the Americas. “Firms are shaping their real-estate strategy in response to these trends and a number of ‘new cities of finance’ are emerging across the U.S.”
Scott Wilmarth, Executive Vice President in the Salt Lake office of CBRE added, “Finance is turbo-charging growth in the greater Salt Lake City market, and this growth has been good for the local economy. Of the total employee base in Salt Lake City, roughly 10 percent work in financial activities. In an economy as diverse as Utah’s—our economy is consistently ranked one of the top most diverse in the nation, often ranking #1—this 10 percent total is significant. Anything that impacts the greater finance industry has the potential to moderately impact our local economy. As national shifts continue to evolve, and commercial markets respond to these new economic realities, Salt Lake’s finance market will continue to expand, undergoing a financial transformation of its own.”
The report further identifies five “next-generation” markets that, according to proprietary analysis by CBRE’s Labor Analytics group, offer affordable real estate and expanding pools of skilled labor even though the financial-services industry has, as yet, as smaller footprint in each. Included among those are Provo, Utah and Boise, Idaho.
Based on CBRE’s examination of skilled-labor availability, labor costs, real-estate costs, market education levels and other factors, many of these active and next-generation markets scored highly as ideal recruiting and employment centers for the types of workers sought by the industry.
- Salt Lake City, Tampa, San Antonio, Phoenix and
Columbus rank highly among cities offering the best mix of labor availability
and cost for shared services jobs,
which include back-office roles such as accounting, human resources, legal and
finance.
- Columbus, Charlotte and Phoenix rank as ideal
recruiting grounds for risk and
compliance workers, such as quantitative analysts, mathematicians and
compliance officers.
- Provo, Salt Lake City and Charlotte are among those
atop the list of cities providing a balance of labor availability and cost for
financial-services technology jobs
such as software developers, web developers and information-security analysts.
“Financial services companies are continuing to seek out new and emerging locations that provide them with access to talent at affordable rates,” said Kristin Sexton, CBRE’s Managing Director of Labor Analytics. “Labor is the driving force behind the growth of the financial services industry in these smaller, ‘active’ markets.”
To view the full report, click here.
About CBRE Group, Inc.
CBRE Group, Inc.
(NYSE:CBG), a Fortune 500 and S&P 500 company headquartered in Los Angeles,
is the world’s largest commercial real estate services and investment firm (based
on 2015 revenue). The Company has more
than 70,000 employees (excluding affiliates), and serves real estate investors
and occupiers through more than 400 offices (excluding affiliates)
worldwide. CBRE offers a broad range of
integrated services, including facilities, transaction and project management; property
management; investment management; appraisal and valuation; property leasing; strategic
consulting; property sales; mortgage services and development services. Please visit our website at www.cbre.com.
