Nashville’s office job market is one of the strongest in the U.S.
Nashville is churning out office and healthcare jobs, helping the metro continue to attract educated and highly skilled workers. We expect Nashville’s labor market and desirability will keep the market very popular in the near-term.
Known globally for its music scene and tourist appeal, Nashville has pulled masses of young professionals and a respectable number of businesses to the metro in recent years, yielding a powerful job growth of 7% year-over-year, according to Green Street Advisors. Nashville’s unemployment rate is lower than that of the U.S., and Nashville is expected to continue outpacing national job growth through 2026, according to Oxford Economics.
Nashville’s job market durability shone brightly in CONTI Capital’s own analysis of our Top 50 markets, particularly when it came to growth in office-using jobs. Not only do these jobs generally earn bigger salaries than jobs in other sectors, but office-using jobs recovered from the pandemic at a faster pace as they adapted to remote work more easily.
Nashville experienced a solid 8.5% growth in office-using jobs year-over-year in April, per our analysis, and in the overlapping job category of professional and businesses services, Nashville hit 9% job growth year-over-year.
Amazon’s new offices in Nashville – one tower of which is open to workers, and the other of which is expected to open soon – has already created more than 5,000 office and technology jobs in the city, according to Amazon. AllianceBernstein recently relocated to Nashville from Manhattan, creating more than 1,000 office jobs at salaries between $150,000 to $200,000 per year, according to CoStar. In addition, Oracle announced in 2021 that they would build a campus in the Nashville metro to house 8,500 workers, according to the MarketWatch.
Healthcare is also a significant pillar of the Nashville job market – Community Health Systems, Saint Thomas Health, Vanderbilt University Medical and National Healthcare Corp. are all among the metro’s top 10 employers, according to Green Street. Healthcare and education research make up a significant proportion of Nashville’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), according to Oxford Economics.
Higher-earning office and healthcare jobs are a boon to the Nashville economy, with the added benefit that they lure workers to the city who are financially comfortable enough to afford top-of-market rents, resulting in strong occupancy levels in high-end apartment properties. While growth in apartment demand has begun to cool somewhat, demand remains higher than it was prior to the pandemic, according to CoStar. Looking ahead, Nashville is forecast to see robust population growth in the near-term, particularly among the prime renter age cohort of 25 to 34 years old.
Enticed by Nashville’s demographic and labor market strengths, multifamily investors poured more than $4 billion into area deals in 2021, doubling the metro’s previous annual record set in 2019 according to CoStar. Investor interest has stayed strong in 2022, with $800 million garnered in the first and second quarter – deal levels not seen in Nashville prior to the last four quarters.
CONTI has its eye on Nashville’s multifamily market, and considering the momentum behind its office-using and healthcare labor markets, we expect demand for quality assets will stay high for the next several years.