What Exactly Do We Mean By Recovery?

Declaring that an economy has recovered, at least in the context of the latest recession (you might have read about it – it was in all the blogs), is a tricky undertaking. Are we counting “recovery” as a return to the economy at the peak of the bubble, at where it was before the bubble began, or at some guess at where it would have been without the bubble?

Aside from the timing, what are we waiting for to recover? If it was just a matter of visitor volume, Las Vegas finished its recovery last year. Since I'm a commercial real estate researcher working for a commercial real estate firm (Colliers International, to be precise), do I need commercial real estate to fully recover before I declare the local economy recovered?

For the purpose of this article, I offer two definitions of recovery. A recovery will:

• Bring the local economy back to a point before the beginning of the bubble (circa 2005)

• Use an index of the following measures of the local economy – New Home Sales, Commercial Occupancy, Gaming Revenue, Visitor Volume, New Residents, Employment, Taxable Sales, and Port Traffic in Los Angeles (this is the Recovery Index I have been using since 2009)

Using these definitions, Southern Nevada’s economy had an index value of 100 in January 2005. The index reached a peak of 109 in October 2006 and a trough of 83 in April 2010.

At this trough, Southern Nevada's economy reached an index value it hadn't seen since its last recession in 2001/2002 - essentially erasing 8 years of economic growth. It is entirely possible that the growth we might have seen during that period, had there been no economic surge, is gone forever. One could argue that, sans the surge, the economy would have an index value of 110 now, an index value we're about 5 years away from reaching at the current rate of growth, which isn't negligible.

If we look at index growth in 5 year periods, we see the following:

1996-2000 = 26.2% (5.2% average annual growth)
2001-2005 = 19.4% (3.9% average annual growth)
2006-2010 = -17.5% (-3.5% average annual growth)
2011-2013 = 9.4% (3.1% average annual growth)

Current index growth is about 80% of what it was in 2001-2005, and 60% of what it was in 1996-2000. Growth in the last three years is about at 90% of the negative growth experienced in the "plague years" of 2006-2010. If we wanted to erase the effects of the Great Recession, we would need to more than double current rates of growth, a situation unlikely without an explosion in construction activity in Southern Nevada.

Where is Southern Nevada today in terms of getting back to where it was in 2005, what one might call a "do-over recovery"?

In September 2013, Southern Nevada’s economy has an index value of 94, so not recovered yet, but not so far off. In 2012, the index value started at 89, increased to 93 by November 2012, and then it started to fall. From February 2013 to May 2013, the index value stuck at 91. Growth began in June and has continued since. If economic growth in the next few years matches the growth pattern of 2012/2013, Southern Nevada’ s economy should finish recovering by October of 2016!

Could the recovery move more quickly? Naturally. The economy was stronger in 2011 than it was in 2012 and has been in 2013, so it is certainly possible for the economy to recover at a faster pace. If we were to assume economic recovery on pace with 2011, Southern Nevada would have finished its recovery in July 2015 – better, but nothing to crow about.

Given the two possible rates of recovery described above, it seems reasonable to assume that Southern Nevada’s economy, and specifically its commercial real estate market, have at least two or three more years to go before they can be said to have recovered to a pre-recession level. Simply put, Southern Nevada is not currently making up the ground it lost during the Great Recession.