Real estate & rental
The share of jobs within commuting reach of a tract that are in real estate, rental and leasing, and how that share has moved over five years.
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Of all the jobs within commuting reach of a tract, the share that are in real estate, rental and leasing. This describes the composition of the nearby job market rather than its size.
The Census Bureau defines the sector as comprising "establishments primarily engaged in renting, leasing, or otherwise allowing the use of tangible or intangible assets, and establishments providing related services." The assets "may be tangible, as is the case of real estate and equipment, or intangible, as is the case with patents and trademarks." The sector "also includes establishments primarily engaged in managing real estate for others, selling, renting, and/or buying real estate for others, and appraising real estate" (2022 NAICS Manual).
Two things follow for reading this share. First, it is broader than housing: equipment leasing, vehicle and consumer goods rental, and licensing of intangible assets all sit in the same sector, so a high value does not by itself indicate a busy housing market. Second, the sector's employment is small relative to the value of the assets it handles, because much of the activity produces income for owners rather than payroll. The Bureau notes directly that "a substantial proportion of property management is self-performed by lessors," which never appears as a job in this sector at all.
Metrics in this family#
Considerations#
Jobs are counted at the workplace, not at the worker's residence. Brokerage and management offices are also administrative locations: the properties they handle can be anywhere, so this share describes where the business of property is conducted, not where property is being transacted.
The Census Bureau protects employer confidentiality before publication. The disclosure limitation applied to "the workplace component of LODES uses employer-level input noise infusion" (McKinney et al., CES-WP-20-30), so published small-area values are perturbed relative to the underlying counts.
Coverage is jobs subject to state unemployment insurance, plus federal workers from 2010 onward (OnTheMap Data Overview). People working on a self-employed or independent-contractor basis are outside that frame, and so is the owner-performed property management the sector definition describes. The reference period is the second quarter of each year.
Two gaps carry through from the published files: Alaska has no workplace data after 2016 and Michigan none after 2021. Tracts there carry no value rather than a zero.
The twenty sector shares sum to one, so movement in this share is always relative to the rest of the local job mix.
Birdseye derives these shares from the sector job counts the Census Bureau publishes; the shares themselves are not a published series.
References#
- 12022 NAICS Manualhttps://www.census.gov/naics/reference_files_tools/2022_NAICS_Manual.pdf
- 2McKinney et al., CES-WP-20-30https://www2.census.gov/ces/wp/2020/CES-WP-20-30.pdf
- 3OnTheMap Data Overviewhttps://lehd.ces.census.gov/doc/help/onthemap/OnTheMapDataOverview.pdf