New data shows Marin County jobs recovered by 2012

Marin County was the first county in the North Bay to recover jobs lost in the Great Recession, according to new data available.

The 2008 downturn started to show up statistically in unemployment data from April of that year, when employment numbers from all six North Bay counties started to fall significantly. At that time, the unemployment rate in Marin was just under 4 percent, and rose to a peak of 8.4 percent in January 2010.

According to new data just recently available from the Employment Development Department, just three and a half years later, by December 2012, the number of people with jobs in Marin was back up to 109,000. By comparison, Sonoma County is just now seeing employment figures similar to where they peaked in 2008.

Now at a low of 3.3 percent unemployment, Marin County is only behind number one San Mateo County, for the State of California, by one tenth of a percent.

Marin's trajectory of growth is faster than Sonoma's due in large part to its proximity to San Francisco.

'Marin's economic growth is a classic cycling that has occurred for the last three decades, creeping up from San Francisco and trickling out,' said Robert Eyler, professor of economics at at Sonoma State University who has studied the Marin economy.

After 2008, many industries saw a steep drop in jobs and activity. Service providing industries dropped almost 8,000 jobs, leisure and hospitality lost 2,000 jobs as did the transportation and utilities industry. The construction industry took a big hit, going from 6,500 jobs in April 2008 to a low of 4,500 in Feb. 2010. By August 2013 it was back up to 6,000, and by October 2014 it was at 6,400.

According to Haden Ongaro, managing director for the commercial real estate company Newmark Cornish & Carey, in the last several months there has been flurry of sales transactions in Marin, including five significant deals for more than 50,000 square feet.

'Last year we started to see lease rates in Larkspur at a near an all-time high, an indication that the market was back,' Ongaro said. Capitalization rates are also lower, below six percent for investment sales, and there is also major construction at BioMarin, he noted.