Tracked.com Topics: The Housing Market
By Taryn Cooper, at 2:16 pm on November 11th, 2009Unless you’ve been living somewhere with zero television coverage, no newspapers or any access to Internet, we all have heard housing horror stories…Foreclosures, Variable Rates and Jingle Mail, oh my!
According to U.S. Census Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Building Permits and Housing Completions’ statistics were below their month-over-month and year-over-year estimates for the month of September. However, Housing Starts showed promise.
The report states that “Privately-owned housing starts in September were at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 590,000,” which was 0.5% above the August number. This number was still below September 2008’s rate of 822,000. “Single-family housing starts in September were at a rate of 501,000,” the report later says, 3.9% above August’s revised rate.
With this news on housing starts, is housing perhaps turning the proverbial corner?
If you’d like a biased opinion, simply ask the home builders! Toll Brothers released its early 4Q report today, where revenues were down 30% in the quarter. However, if you listen to their Chairman Robert I. Toll, you will hear nothing but glowing reviews for the new home market. Well, perhaps “glowing” is too extravagant a word. Although he does admit to there being “choppy waters” in the housing market, he believes some indicators in the new home market will continue to improve. That said, new orders for Toll Brothers rose a whopping 42% in the fourth quarter, suggesting improvement in new home sales as well.
Toll Brothers was not the only builder reporting good news in their quarterly reports, as Beazer Homes reported positive gains on Monday for its fiscal fourth quarter. While revenues fell 42% over the quarter, new orders increased 2.4%, an increase year-over-year of the same percentage. Beazer Homes’s performance was mostly based on an early debt payment, which allowed to book an $89.3 million GAIN.
Economic statistics look encouraging and home builders are reporting such positive results in the market, and the CEO of real estate brokerage Realogy Corporation believes the housing market recovery is due in large part to the government’s program of tax-credit for first-time home buyers. Richard Smith suggested that this is the beginning of the long-term correction of the housing market, which he says “has corrected by some 28 percent from peak to trough.”
Residential construction statistics for the month of October will be released on Wednesday, November 18. With the tax-credit program having been extended for first-time home buyers, it will be curious to see how the statistics panned out for October.
