"Booming" claim busted
The tip came from the side of the news building that most reporters suspect and shun: Advertising.
Tallahassee car dealerships were in a foul funk, selling fewer cars and therefore buying fewer ads. But, when we called dealers to ask what was going on, each and every one claimed business was booming.
Booming? We returned from visiting the computer clerk in the county recorder's office with a stack of monthly new car registration reports, which turned out to be the first key to dissecting the local economy. (HINT: This dataset also produced shorts on the hottest selling vehicles in town and statistics on out-of-town buyers. Later we learned the reports already were being collected each month by our own advertising department.)
The car registration reports were broken down not only by dealership but also vehicle model. Month-to-month comparisons showed sales were way down. Plotting the numbers on six-month and 12-month rolling averages showed we were looking at an entrenched slump, not a glitch in the market.
Armed with something solid, we called the dealers back. "Business is great!" they said again, but when we started citing their own slipping sales numbers, the interviews took a dramatic turn. Suddenly, the dealers were trying to explain a mysterious slump that was dragging down Tallahassee's economy.
Business reporter Lisa Newkirk and I decided to try to take the pulse of the region, dividing the economy into sectors and, like the car dealership story, accumulating data on the performance of each one.
Lagging employment and wages
The Florida Division of Labor and Employment Security (www.state.fl.us/dles/main/statdata.htm) keeps an electronic warehouse of reports, downloadable in spreadsheet format. Most useful were the ES-202s, quarterly surveys of employment levels and wages broken down by county and by job sector. The standardized reports allowed easy statewide and national comparisons. Importing 10 years of reports into Excel, we could tell where Tallahassee was lagging in job and wage growth.
Slim pickings, housing glut
A detailed database of home listings and sales, kept by the local realtors association, reflected activity in the housing market. It showed what was selling and where. More importantly, it showed what was not selling. The "market time," the period a home was on the market before being sold, had stretched to three years in what once had been Tallahassee's hottest housing developments – hallmarks of a building glut.
Because realtor records don't reflect homes sold by developers, builders or individual homeowners (the "For-Sale-By-Owner" crowd), we turned to a commercial service for more detailed activity reports. The Florida-based Metro Market Trends collects monthly data tapes from county clerk and building permit offices. Our advertising department already subscribed, so we had free access. In addition to home sales, the reports showed a sharp drop in building permit activity and a rise in mortgage foreclosure filings. (Some of the same data also is available directly from local building permit offices.)
From spurt to sputter
We mapped population growth – important to fuel the home construction industry – using the Census Bureau