NEW YORK CITY—September's strong jobs report carried especially positive implications for the office sector, says Cushman & Wakefield in its Weekly Economic Update. The month saw 105,000 positions added across the three main office-using sectors—financial services, professional and business services and information--representing only the fifth time in the past decade that office-using employment has increased by more than 100,000 in a single month.

“Employment in both financial services and information increased by 12,000 jobs each,” according to Ken McCarthy, senior managing director, economic analysis and forwcasting at C&W. He singles out the growth in information employment: “In the 10 months from July 2013 to May 2014, information employment fell by 43,000 jobs. But in the past four months, almost all those jobs have been recovered. As a result of this growth, office-using employment is now above 30 million in the US for the first time in history.”

While reporting 248,000 jobs being added to payrolls during September, the Labor Department also revised upward the level of employment for both July and August. Oriignally reported at 209,000 jobs, July is now just behind September at 243,000, and although August still fell below the average of 200,000 jobs per month, it fell short by a smaller number than was first reported: 180,000 jobs added, compared to the 142,000 originally announced.

“Strong employment growth is, of course, a boon to the commercial real estate sector,” McCarthy writes. “Growth in office-using employment is an indicator of rising demand for office space and should support healthier office markets throughout the nation.”

Additionally, he observes, “more jobs lead to more income and should support a continuing healthy expansion of retail sales, supporting both the retail and industrial sectors. More jobs mean more business and leisure travel, which is positive for the hotel sector.” It also bodes well for multifamily, portending an increase in household formation.

That being said, McCarthy also points to some worrisome trends beneath the robust topline numbers. “The unemployment rate declined from 6.1% to 5.9%,” he writes. “But as we have seen throughout this recovery, that improvement is somewhat misleading. The number of people unemployed did decline, but it was not offset by a similar number of jobs added.”

As a result, the labor force, i.e. the total number of people either working or looking for work, fell for the second consecutive month. “While the number of people in the labor force fell, the population increased,” writes McCarthy. “As a result, the share of the population active in the labor force, which is generally referred to as the labor force participation rate, fell once again. Since the recession began in 2008, the labor force participation rate has fallen from 66.2% to the current 62.7%. That is the lowest participation rate since 1977.”

This suggests that “a lot of workers have dropped out of the labor force,” he writes. While this could be explained by the aging of the baby boom generation, “it also indicates that there may be a lot of discouraged workers who would come back into the labor force if they perceived better employment prospects.”

Given the acceleration in job growth over the past seven months, this decline in participation is “a bit puzzling,” observes McCarthy. “We would expect the participation rate to begin to rise in the coming year as the economy continues to grow at a strong pace.”