— The Mankato region’s economy continues to grow, but the economic recovery here and in the state is still inching forward with fits and starts.

Construction of new housing, particularly apartment complexes, has been soaring locally this year and existing home sales are up, with sales prices significantly stronger than last year.

And while job numbers grow, the manufacturing sector shed an unusually high number of jobs last month.

“Overall, we’ve had a couple of decent months here. It remains a relatively slow recovery — a lot of that comes with very slow growth or a decline in the public employee sector,” said Steve Hine, director of the Labor Market Information office at the state Department of Employment and Economic Development.

“We’ve only regained about half as many jobs as we lost in the recession and it took a long time to do that. It’s an upward turn, but it’s not as steep as we’d like to see.”

While manufacturing has had a fairly strong post-recession rebound, July saw the sector shedding jobs at a faster rate. In the nine-county area in and around Mankato, the number of first-time unemployment claims filed by manufacturing employees jumped 71 percent over a year earlier. There was a substantially smaller increase in manufacturing unemployment claims statewide — 25 percent.

Hine said the one-month jump could be an anomaly of timing as some manufacturing plants in the area furloughed employees to retool or gear up for a new project.

He noted that statewide for the first seven months of the year, the number of unemployment claims in manufacturing were almost identical to last year.

And Hine noted that manufacturing job numbers have been one of the bright spots recently.

“Manufacturing and construction have shown an improvement over last year. It’s been a long time since those two sectors were in the top of the pack for job growth so that’s encouraging.”



Vehicle sales stronger

The number of cars and trucks sold in Mankato was up 22 percent in the first seven months of this year. Dealers sold 5,449 vehicles through July compared to 4,461 for the same period last year.

 

Home sales, prices up

Through July there have been 905 existing home sales in south-central Minnesota, up 2 percent from the 887 sold in the same period last year.

The median sales price in July ($136,500) was up 15 percent over July of 2011 ($118,950).



Housing

construction soars

Mankato and North Mankato issued 108 building permits for new housing construction through July, up from 61 during the same period last year.

Many of the permits were for multi-unit apartment complexes rather than single-family homes.



Commercial

construction slower

The value of permits issued for new construction and remodeling work in the commercial/industrial sector is slower this year.

Through July of this year, Mankato issued about $12.3 million in commercial/industrial permits, down 10 percent from the same period last year.

North Mankato saw a dramatic drop of 88 percent with $1.8 million in permits so far this year. The figure is skewed by the fact North Mankato had an unusually large — $11 million — in permits issued last April for a major construction project.



Consumer spending climbs

The local sales taxes collected by Mankato grew 6 percent during the first six months of this year compared to the first half of last year. The city collected more than $2.3 million in taxes this year compared to $2.2 million for the same period last year.