Orlando hotels filled about eight of every 10 rooms in March, a rare feat that hasn’t happened in three years.

Properties in the Orlando area logged an average occupancy rate of 80.6 percent — the first time the local market has topped 80 percent since March 2008. And last month’s occupancy was up 9.9 percent compared with the same month a year ago, according to data released Wednesday by Smith Travel Research.

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ALBANY, N.Y.—Schuyler Tilly, a banker at First Niagara Financial Group, sits at a long office table and spreads out documents outlining the terms of a $1 million line of credit he just extended to local businessman John Stevens.

“I don’t think there are going to be any surprises here,” Mr. Tilly tells Mr. Stevens, who runs a wireless-engineering company.

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Florida’s unemployment rate for March is 11.1 percent, the governor announced this morning. “And while that number is still too high,” Gov. Rick Scott said in a news conference, “it represents a nearly 1 percent decrease since I became governor.” Florida’s unemployment rate hovered around 12 percent throughout 2010. It began showing signs of improvement during the first two months of this year, dropping to 11.5 percent in February. For the first time since taking office three months ago, Scott held a news conference this morning to personally the monthly unemployment rate. The Agency for Workforce Innovation usually just issues a news release to announce the rates followed by a call-in news conference with its economist.

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Housing and commercial real estate are seemingly going in opposite directions nationally with housing prices and sales totals continuing to fall and CRE markets taking steps toward recovery. However, the fear of a double-dip housing recession is tangible – if not real – and continues to tug naggingly on the CRE industry.

When the recession began in 2007, the commercial real estate markets declines lagged but eventually paralleled the declines of the hardest-hit residential markets. If housing goes into a double-dip recession, the question many are wondering if commercial real estate is likely to follow? That was the question we put to a variety of CRE professionals and analysts.

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Florida leads the nation in its potential to grow jobs, according to a new Wells Fargo report that predicts a major rebound in the Sunshine State’s battered hiring climate.

In raking states by regional competitiveness — intrinsic factors that lead employers to create jobs in that state versus others nearby — Florida scored first in the Wells Fargo study released Wednesday morning.

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Florida’s leading indicator — a measurement of economic activity in the state compiled by Durham, N.H.-based e-forecasting.com — increased by 0.3 percent in February after going up 0.3 percent in January.

The February data is the most recent available.

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After four consecutive quarters of positive net absorption, the Central Florida industrial and flex market dipped back into the red during the first quarter of 2011.

Transformation. That’s the word that enters economist David Marks’ mind when he looks at the plans for the SunRail commuter rail system that will link Orlando with Volusia, Seminole, and Osceola communities. As Marks sees it, the SunRail will transform Central Florida into a modern, sustainable community that will dramatically improve Central Florida’s economy.

“SunRail’s 61-mile route will eventually define the core of urban living in Central Florida,” says David Marks, a nationally-recognized urban economist who has amassed a 20-year study of sustainable communities. “For an area of about two-miles from these rail stations—an area of approximately 8,000 acres—we’ll see the sort of urbanization that has made many European communities and some American communities more livable.”

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As Florida crawls out of its recessionary funk, Metro Orlando is leading the state in job creation, adding almost 23,000 jobs in the past year, or more than two-thirds of the state’s total job gains.

But a look at where those jobs are coming from raises questions about how much punch Central Florida’s economic rebound will pack — at least in the near future.

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