» Small businesses would have been hurt by long shutdown,

State ranked 22nd in nation in impact of federal shutdown.

With a vote to end the government shutdown late Monday, it appears that Georgia small businesses and the state’s housing industry dodged the damage that an extended closure would have caused.

If the three-day-old shutdown had continued, those businesses would have borne the brunt of the impact, according to a survey by a WalletHub, Washington, D.C.-based data research company. In a ranking of the states most affected by the shutdown, Georgia was in the middle, at 22, the company said.

Real estate companies depend on information from the Internal Revenue Service. But the greatest damage would have hit small Georgia businesses that were in line to obtain loans.

The average small business loan size in Georgia is $459,133, highest of all states, according to WalletHub.

And since the health of small business is generally seen as crucial to job growth, a freeze on federal loans could have been a problem.

A temporary shuttering of the Internal Revenue Service could have been a problem for Georgia’s housing market.

Without the IRS, a mortgage company cannot verify a borrower’s income using taxpayer data. The IRS had stopped processing all forms, according to the National Association of Realtors.

Hardest hit by a prolonged shutdown would be Washington, D.C., followed by Maryland and Virginia. The states least affected would be Indiana, Michigan and Minnesota, according to WalletHub.

Georgia has 2.36 percent of its jobs on the federal payroll, slightly less than the national average of 2.63 percent, WalletHub said.