Ciushman & Wakefield's Rebecca Rockey The S&P has closed higher each week for three consecutive weeks, Rockey says.

NEW YORK CITY—Even as global economic uncertainty persists, US businesses kept the faith by hiring at a strong pace in February, Cushman & Wakefield says in its latest Employment Tracker. The month’s better-than-expected employment report marked a rebound from a disappointing January and continued a run of improving economic data.

February’s performance gives a clean bill of health to the fundamentals that underpin commercial real estate. Moreover, the good economic news is “finally calming the nerves of the anxious equity markets,” says Rebecca Rockey, head of forecasting—Americas for Cushman & Wakefield Research.

“For the first time this year, we have now observed three straight weeks in which the S&P closed higher than the week before, for example,” she adds. As of this past Thursday’s close, US equities were down only 2.5% from the year-end 2015 level, marking “a substantial improvement since mid-February when stock prices were down 10.5%,” according to C&W’s Employment Tracker report. This greatly reduces “the downside risk that the sell-off in the financial markets will markedly impact the broader economy.”

Nonfarm payrolls increased by a net 242,000, up by 70,000 from January. That included 41,000 office-using jobs and 54,900 positions in retail. The month saw 278,000 new jobs added, but the gains were offset somewhat by losses of 18,000 jobs in the mining sector, 16,000 in manufacturing positions and 5,300 in transportation and warehousing.

Moreover, job gains have averaged 222,700 per month for the 12 months ending February 2016, for an annual total of 2.67 million jobs added, according to the BLS’ Current Employment Survey. Dallas-based Axiometrics notes that while that figure is lower than the March 2014-February 2015 total of 3.31 million jobs, “it is still strong compared to the early years of the recovery.” The employment-population ratio also increased for the fourth consecutive month, to 59.8%, up 50 basis points  from the year-ago period, says Axiometrics..

Along with a healthy pace of hiring in February, “10 of the 15 major industry groups recorded a year-over-year growth rate of 2% or greater in hourly earnings for 12 consecutive months,” Rockey says. “We expect wage growth to continue to increase, leading to healthy growth in income and consumer spending. That will ultimately feed business growth and the real estate sector.”

Among major markets, Minneapolis posted the lowest unemployment rate at the end of February, 3.2%. Denver and San Francisco both came in at 3.3%, while Austin wasn’t far behind at 3.4%. Those with the highest unemployment rates were Las Vegas (6.5%), Detroit (6.2%), Miami (6.1%), Los Angeles (5.9%) and Chicago (5.8%).

“This bevy of metrics suggests that future labor demand, and therefore future demand for space, will remain healthy,” says Kevin Thorpe, C&W’s chief economist and global head of research. “No single factor is more important for commercial real estate than job creation, and from that perspective, the fundamentals remain as solid as any time since the economic expansion began seven years ago.”

While February’s employment report was better than expected—a consensus estimate among economists called for 190,000 new jobs during them month—C&W notes that “the combination of soft industrial production and trade data, along with the potential for more global headwinds, will likely lead the Fed to delay further rate increases until later this year as it seeks a better sense of the overall state of the US and global economies. But the February employment report should quiet the talks of a recession occurring in the US anytime soon.”