The Lehigh Valley Economic Development Corporation (LVEDC) recently released the latest issue of its Lehigh Valley Commercial Real Estate Report, which for the first time includes information on the cost of living in the Lehigh Valley.
The latest report covers data from the third quarter of 2018. The Lehigh Valley Commercial Real Estate Report is a quarterly publication that provides economic data about the region’s office and industrial markets.
According to data in the report from the Council for Community and Economic Research, the Lehigh Valley is 127 percent more affordable than Manhattan, 68 percent more affordable than Brooklyn, 43 percent more affordable than Boston and 17 percent more affordable than North Jersey.
The Lehigh Valley has seen 281,300 square feet of deliveries to the office market thus far in 2018, according to the report. Of that amount, 270,000 square feet is Class A office space that was built in urban cores of the region. A large portion of the development comes from the construction of Tower 6 in Allentown and the Gateway Building on Greenway Park in Bethlehem.
“The Lehigh Valley office market continues to be very strong, especially in the urban areas of Allentown with the NIZ and Bethlehem with the CRIZ,” Cindy McDonnell Feinberg, principal with Feinberg Real Estate Advisors, said.
There have been 2.7 million square-feet in deliveries to the Lehigh Valley’s industrial market, and 4.9 million square feet are currently under construction, the report found. The Lehigh Valley’s industrial market has reached 121.2 million square feet as of the third quarter of 2018.
“The Lehigh Valley’s gross domestic product reached a record-high $40.1 billion for 2017, and growth in manufacturing was responsible for about 36 percent of that year-over-year GDP increase,” LVEDC President & CEO Don Cunningham said in the report. “The Lehigh Valley is unique among major metropolitan areas in the United States in that manufacturing is driving such a large percentage of its growth.”
The report also found that the Lehigh Valley’s unemployment rate as of August 2018 was 4.2 percent, as compared to 5.0 percent a year earlier.