In this Real Estate News Brief for the week ending April 8th, 2023... reports show a slowly weakening job market, what could be a great year for single-family rentals, and a list of the top metros for home value growth and stability.    Hi, I'm Kathy Fettke and this is Real Estate News for Investors. If you like our podcast, please subscribe and leave us a review.   Economic News   We begin with economic news from this past week. Although the job market remains strong, the latest reports show it is softening. For the week of March 25th, jobless claims hit 228,000. It’s the ninth week in a row that they’ve topped 200,000. They had bottomed out last fall when they dropped to a 53-year low of 182,000. They continued around the 200,000 level for several months and have been slowly rising since February. Government revisions also show that claims during the first part of the year were higher than previously reported. MarketWatch economists say that’s probably due to corporate layoffs that are just now showing up in the jobless data. (1)   Job openings are also declining. They fell to a 21-month low in February, which is another sign that the job market is softening. Listings dropped from 10.6 million in January to 9.9 million in February. Openings are now down to about 1.7 openings for each unemployed worker. They were at 1.9 openings or each unemployed worker previously. Bill Adams of Comerica told MarketWatch: “The labor market is still very hot but the big drop in job openings is a sign the labor market is cooling in general.” (2)   A third report on job growth shows that U.S. companies added 236,000 new jobs in March. That’s a sign of strength and resiliency, and probably not what the Fed would like to hear. Those new jobs helped lower the unemployment rate from 3.6% to 3.5%. Wage growth was slower however. It’s come down from 4.6% in February to 4.2% in March. (3)   A report on construction spending shows it was down slightly in February. The Commerce Department says it fell .1% to $1.844 trillion. Single-family construction spending was down 1.8% while multi-family spending was up 1.4%. Year-over-year, multifamily is up 22.2%. Single-family is up 21.4%. (4)   Mortgage Rates   Mortgage rates dipped slightly this last week. Freddie Mac says the average 30-year fixed-rate mortgage was down 4 basis points to 6.28%. The 15-year was down 8 points to 5.64%. (5)   In other news making headlines…   Single-Family Rental Market Remains Strong   Some parts of the housing market may be in for a rough ride this year, but the single-family rental market isn’t one of them. A new report from Attom projected single-family rental yields for 212 counties with a population of at least 100,000. Rental yields are calculated by dividing the annualized gross rent by the purchase price. According to Attom, rentals in those 212 counties will see a 7.5% yield this year. That’s up from 6.7% last year. (6)   Attom says that SFR rents are growing in over 90 of the counties analyzed, so those counties will be the most desirable. Three of the top five counties for the biggest upside in rent yields are in Florida including counties for Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and West Palm Beach. California’s Orange and Santa Clara counties are the other two. There’s a lot of data in this report so it’s worth digging deeper if you’re deciding where to buy a rental property this year. You’ll find a link to the report in the show notes.   Texas Shows Strength for Overall Housing Market   Another report on the U.S. housing market lists the top 20 cities for growth and stability, and 12 of them are in Texas. The Smart Asset study compared home value data for 400 metros between 1998 and 2022. It then calculated the growth rate from that data. (7)   The Austin, Texas, area was In the number one spot for growth and stability followed by Midland, Texas, in the Western part of the state. Boulder and Fort Collins, Colorado, took the third and fourth spots. The Kennewick-Richland part o