It’s good to be in real estate in Canada these days. That may change if the much-debated and possibly nonexistent housing bubble ever bursts, but for now, workers in the sector are seeing the country’s biggest pay hikes.
Wages in real estate, rental and leasing jumped a massive 12.2 per cent in the year to January, StatsCan reported this week.
Closely-related construction jobs also saw significant wage gains, with average earnings, including overtime, spiking 6.7 per cent over the past year. That’s well above the overall average increase in wages in Canada -- up 3 per cent in the past year.
Wage gains have been very unevenly spread. Even as the real estate business saw double-digit gains, some industries are seeing wages shrink, in particular information and cultural-industry jobs, where wages were down more than 1 per cent in the year to January.
But with the job market showing weakness at the end of 2013, those wage gains slowed at the start of the new year. Wages were “virtually unchanged” from December to January, StatsCan said.
Overall, the StatsCan survey found Canada lost about 7,000 jobs in January, contradicting the agency’s earlier labour report, which found Canada gained 29,000 jobs that month. The two reports often contradict each other, though they tend to show the same trends in the long term.
Check out the largest and smallest wage gains in Canada over the past year:
