This month’s jobs report from the National Apartment Association (NAA) shows that apartment maintenance technician jobs in Portland and Seattle had the highest demand across the country.
The need for people to fill apartment-maintenance technician positions were more than three times the U.S. average in Raleigh, Portland, Jacksonville, Denver and Seattle, according to the National Apartment Association Education Institute (NAAEI) Apartment Jobs Snapshot January 2019.
Median market salaries for apartment-maintenance technician jobs was $33,814 in Portland and $34,262 in Seattle. Most jobs required only up to two years or less experience.
High number of jobs in rental housing
The apartment-industry labor market held its momentum from late last year into 2019, with apartment jobs representing more than 37 percent of job openings in the real estate sector.
Jobs available in the rental-housing industry rose from an average of 35 percent last year to more than 37 percent of the real estate sector in January.
Days-to-fill were particularly challenging in Baltimore, where the unemployment rate fell to post-recession lows at the end of last year, and Nashville, which currently boasts the tightest labor market of major metro areas across the United States.
Maintenance-tech skill set still highly sought as titles change
The change in the proportion of job titles over the past five years is not only reflective of demand, i.e. the highly sought-after maintenance tech, but of recruiters providing more focused and appealing titles, the NAA report says.
The generic “apartment manager” has given way to “community manager,” while the surge of assistant property managers and maintenance supervisors reveals a clear career path within those sectors.
The greatest increases in skills desired for all types of positions included both specialized skills such as Yardi Matrix software, and soft skills, particularly writing and collaboration.
National apartment association jobs report background
The jobs report focuses on jobs that are being advertised in the apartment industry as being available, according to Paula Munger, Director, Industry Research and Analysis, for the National Apartment Association’s Education Institute.
“Our education institute is a credentialing body for the apartment industry. They hear often that one of the biggest problems keeping our industry leaders up at night is the difficulty in finding talent, attracting talent and retaining talent,” Munger said. “Labor-market issues are happening in a lot of industries, certainly with the tight labor market we have.”
NAA partnered with Burning Glass Technologies. “They have a labor-job posting database that is proprietary,” she said, and they can “layer on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). We looked at that and thought we could do something that is really going to help the industry and help benchmark job titles and trends as we go forward,” Munger said.
