the Washington Employment Security Department notes<\/a> that 16,835 more people are unemployed this year than last, with 111,845 people in the Seattle-Bellevue-Tacoma region searching for work. <\/p>\n\u201cThis is kind of the scariest time economically for the Seattle region since the Great Recession in 2009. We\u2019ve just become accustomed to growing at a lightning pace, and it\u2019s not clear if and when we\u2019re gonna grow like that in the near future, said Jeff Shulman, the Chair of the University of Washington\u2019s Marketing and International Business Department. <\/p>\n
Both Shulman and Nguyen believe the layoffs at Meta and Amazon are two-fold\u2014finding \u201cefficiencies\u201d in business to increase profitability while AI platforms and investments change longer-term strategies. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a sign of strength to be able to make cost-cutting moves. Eliminate bureaucracy, and become more efficient at earning profit and value for your shareholders.\u201d Shulman said. <\/p>\n
For Kimberly Shaeffer, a realtor at John L. Scott Real Estate, Amazon clients made up the majority of her business. <\/p>\n
\u201cThey have fueled my business, and they\u2019ve fueled the economy,\u201d Shaeffer said. <\/p>\n
Though in the last year, she\u2019s noticed a dramatic shift. Relocation clients used to flood her desk looking for places in Seattle. Last year, though, of the 23 relocation clients they had, 21 moved out of Seattle, including former Amazon employees. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s sad to hear when there are any job cuts and just trying to understand how that\u2019s going to affect our overall city and not only housing, but also businesses or downtown,\u201d Shaeffer said.<\/p>\n
Shaeffer doesn\u2019t believe that Amazon workers leaving the region will be enough to drop down home prices, as she says single-family homes are still seeing multiple offers per listing. However, the growth that Amazon brought also changed the kind of housing around Seattle to prioritize more density, and she thinks that momentum could hit the market within the next year. <\/p>\n
Downtown visits hit 97 percent of pre-pandemic levels, according to the Downtown Seattle Association, while business traffic was at 60 percent of where it was in 2019. Shaeffer says many of the downtown workers she had as clients also worked in the downtown core. <\/p>\n
\u201cAs companies grapple with emerging trends, we hope this pain is short-term. It would be unwise to bet against Seattle in the long run \u2013 the talent pool and fundamental assets are in our favor. The health of our city requires that downtown must be a competitive and attractive place to not only visit and live, but also to locate a business and to grow jobs,\u201d said Jon Scholes, the President and CEO of the Downtown Seattle Association. <\/p>\n
Shulman says diversifying the region\u2019s economy away from tech reliance, like what the city\u2019s economic makeup looked like historically, is crucial. <\/p>\n
Nguyen sees plenty of opportunity in that in the aerospace, satellite, and space technology, AI, quantum mechanics, and one of the more naturally beautiful regions all work in Washington\u2019s favor. The important piece he sees is lawmakers taking a \u2018do no harm\u2019 approach that can make the situation worse. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe have very good fundamentals and ingredients in this area to be very successful going forward. The part that makes me nervous is that you have to invest in those areas. Economic development is kind of a new thing to talk about within this particular region, just because you\u2019ve been able to have so much success with the organic nature of the work that\u2019s being done. But that\u2019s going to be changing.\u201dNguyen said.<\/p>\n
\u00a92026 Cox Media Group<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SEATTLE \u2014 \u201cScary,\u201d \u201cnervous,\u201d \u201csad,\u201d are all words used by experts, analysts, and realtors to describe recent rounds…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":434180,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[28,101,1839,144407],"class_list":{"0":"post-434179","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-economy","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-economy","10":"tag-seattle","11":"tag-seattle-waterfront"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434179","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=434179"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434179\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/434180"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=434179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=434179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=434179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}