Department of Labor says Georgia added 6,900 jobs in March
Georgia's latest jobs report showed the rate held steady at 3.6% unemployment.
According to the Georgia Department of Labor, the state added 6,900 jobs in March while the rate 'held steady.'
'Georgia's job market is full of opportunity, with nearly 5 million jobs and three openings for every Georgian,' Labor Commissioner Bárbara Rivera Holmes said in a statement. 'As labor commissioner, I'm committed to working alongside the governor, lawmakers, and job creators across the state to connect talent with opportunity and ensure Georgia remains the No. 1 state for business for years to come.'
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GDOL said the unemployment rate in Georgia was six-tenths lower than the national rate.
In addition to the 6,900 jobs added in March, GDOL said there had been 23,100 jobs added over the year.
Industries with the most month-over-month job gains were health care and social assistance, information, administrative and support services, management of companies and enterprises and durable goods manufacturing.
However, month-over-month, job numbers fell in transportation and warehousing, accommodation and food services, professional, scientific and technical services, finance and insurance and arts, entertainment and recreation.
In March, GDOL said the overall labor force was down 6,619 and down 2,928 over the past 12 months. The number of people working was down 6,654 in March and down 14,039 for the year as well.
The number of unemployed people in Georgia reached 11,111 over the year, according to GDOL, while unemployment claims were down 1,168 to reach 19,296 in March.
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We've all been saying for decades that it's antiquated. And at this particular moment in time, there's a lot of spirited debate in the industry over how much of the process any one company should control. You have one big player in the market saying that they want to have the listings in-house and they want to be able to represent both sides of the transaction. And there have long been questions about how much any professional should be able to steer business to others. We want consumers to get professional help but how do you walk that line between wanting them to also be able to choose who represents them? Krishna: The problem with the homeownership experience is that there isn't any transparency. It's difficult to figure out whether the realtor that you work with has your best interest. It's difficult to know that you're getting the best rate. It's difficult to understand where you stand in the process, how underwriting works. It's difficult to understand how your loan gets licensed and then serviced and then passed off to another I think the fundamental issue today is there's an illusion of control, that there's any choice at all. And that the fee structures make sense, and the way that the consumers have to choose and what they get to choose… it's a little bit of a fallacy today and we want to improve that.I mean, that is our fundamental ethos is exactly that consumers deserve better. They deserve a system that is more transparent, they deserve to have better rates, they deserve to pay lower fees, they deserve to be able to get into a home faster or sell a home For me, it's really hard to give the consumer a better deal when the title company, the broker, the banker, and the servicing company are all fighting for the customer. We're going to give customers a choice. They can work with a Redfin agent, and then a different banker. They can work with a Rocket banker and then a different agent. But our hope is that by working together, we can give the consumer such a better experience and such a lower fee that what they'll want to do is work with us. But if you keep these industries at each other's throats, where we're all spending money to get the same customer, you're never going to make the industry more efficient. And that's why the consumer is still paying so much every time she moves. USA TODAY: There has been a lot of experimentation, a lot of companies spending a lot of money on big bets, you know, Redfin starting with salaried agents, the iBuyers like Opendoor that buy homes directly from owners, Zillow Offers. Why is it so hard to get the model right? Kelman: I think the consumer is really traditional. It's an infrequent purchase, so once a decade you move and usually you call on a neighbor to help you handle the sale, or you hire your uncle as a real estate agent. Also it's a cooperative industry. So anytime you have a disruptor, the consumer has to worry. When she puts a Redfin sign in her yard, will other buyer agents want to show that listing? You have to worry when you have a RE/MAX agent representing the buyer: will other listing agents really tell that agent what's going on in the deal? Any time there has been a disruptor, there has been an industry reaction and so the challenge here is finding a way to take a very fragmented industry and make it work together better. Krishna: I think part of the reason these things are hard is when you disrupt any kind of hyper-local dynamic, whether it's commerce, real estate, or financial services, you have local fragmentation, word of mouth. You have a diversity in the landscape of how people do this job, where some people sell one or two homes and others take it as a full-time profession. You have varying levels of I just think that most of the companies building technologies in this industry don't actually want to get their hands dirty and serve the customer directly. The first thing Varun and I had in common was just that we wanted to put the consumer first, but the second was that both of us have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in our people. And in most of the industry, if you build a better gadget, you sell leads to a traditional agent or to a traditional loan officer. For us, it just seems hard to build a better mousetrap, have the world beat a path to your door, and then give people the same old service at the same old TODAY: There's a lot of concern about some of the buyers who have purchased recently with rates at cycle highs and very high home prices. While the , we know that homeowners , pretty quickly. Property taxes are also likely to rise. How concerned are you about those borrowers from the perspective of the borrower? And how concerned are you, or how sanguine are you, about the mortgage servicing system being able to manage if we do see an uptick in distress? Krishna: We watch the trends like hawks and we look at everything from leading indicators to lagging indicators on how consumers are spending. Typically the mortgage is the last thing to go, so consumers will do anything and everything to make sure that they stay in their homes. I would say given everything we've seen too far, we're not worried in the sense that we see, you know, deep structural cracks in the way that the industry is developing. But at the same time, we know affordability is a challenge. Inventory is a challenge and we also know that there's still a significant amount of friction in the entire experience as well. We need to start thinking of it as a continuum, where a consumer will progress from renting to eventually ending up in a home which is still the bedrock of the American dream. And if we can help them with that from a lifetime perspective or we can help them not just search and find a home, but to be able to finance it, title it and then service it, we can take a lot of cost out of the system. Part of the problem today is that when you think about the expense, a lot of it goes into things like lead acquisition, right? Mortgage leads are one of the most expensive leads and mortgage companies spend thousands of dollars on individual leads. The margins end up being a little bit low because of that. And then there's no lifetime value because the consumer is in a different part of the funnel for servicing. We can make it faster. This is our approach to saying this is how we want to help fix the problem and to create a model that we think is more sustainable as far as homeownership is concerned. More: As real estate listings become more private, Zillow fights back This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Rocket buys Redfin. 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