05/08/2006 Dow Jones News Services (Copyright © 2006 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.) By Janet Morrissey Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES NEW YORK (Dow Jones)--There are signs a housing slowdown that has gripped certain high-growth markets during the past few quarters, is now spreading nationwide. Preliminary reports from builders Hovnanian Enterprises Inc. (HOV) and Toll Brothers Inc. (TOL), whose quarters ended April 30, indicate demand is falling faster and more sharply than previously thought, and that the pullback is no longer confined to hot markets that had seen sharp home price run-ups in the past few years. Hovnanian's orders fell 20% in its fiscal second quarter - an about-face from the 5.5% order growth reported in its fiscal first quarter. Toll's orders declined 32%, which is steeper than the 29% dropoff posted in its fiscal first quarter. For Toll, the order decline was across the board as all of its geographical regions reported year-over-year decreases in demand. Chairman Robert Toll attributed the declining demand to higher cancellations and to speculative buyers who are dropping out of the market and putting the homes they recently acquired up for sale. Although Toll said his company doesn't sell to speculators, "we have certainly been impacted by the overall increase in supply." On top of this, some builders, such as Centex Corp. (CTX) and Hovnanian, have started taking writedowns in connection with land options. In general, when builders take writedowns to walk away from land options, it is a sign that either land values are falling or demand in that market has dried up. In past cycles, declining land values often were a sign that a market was falling fast. Until now, home-building executives said the pullback in demand was largely confined to markets where sales had been overheated and home prices had skyrocketed during the past few years, such as Washington, D.C., parts of California (especially Sacramento), Phoenix and parts of Florida. They blamed speculative buyers for much of the pullback, saying investors had exited the market, causing less overall demand and more inventory. These hotspots continue to see the sharpest pullbacks, but other markets also are slowing. Majestic Research analyst John Tomlinson, in his monthly report that tracks new-home sales in 40 major markets, found sales fell year over year in every market during February and March, with the average decline being 25%. Washington, D.C., Los Angeles/Long Beach, Tucson, Ariz., Sacramento, San Francisco, and Phoenix saw the biggest declines with sales falling 22%, 50%, 50%, 46%, 30%, and 37%, respectively. However, even markets that hadn't been weak previously - such as Philadelphia, Dallas, and Las Vegas - softened in the quarter, with sales falling 30%, 15%, and 13%, respectively, he said. "Almost every single major market that we track is showing pretty significant year-over-year declines in sales," Tomlinson said. "It's much more broad-based" than it was prior to February. Rising inventory, slowing sales and bigger incentive packages all signal a correction in the housing industry, Tomlinson added. But time will tell if this will lead to big dropoffs in home prices, "which I think most people are most afraid of," he said. So far, builders' efforts to offer more incentives and discounts have "failed to move the needle" in driving sales, Tomlinson said. As a result, he said some may need to resort to bigger price discounts. "That's the million-dollar question," he said. Bernard Markstein, director of forecasting at the National Association of Home Builders, said there is no question housing demand is slowing nationwide. He said rising mortgage rates have given people reason to "pause" in their decision to buy. "We've been getting reports of a slowdown in housing across the board," Markstein said. But so far, he said, it's just a "moderating of activity - not a falling off of the cliff." He describes it as a "return to normalcy." Markstein is predicting that overall housing starts will fall 7% to 1.95 million from 2.1 million in 2005. He sees demand returning to 2004 levels. If companies continue to build at the pace they had in 2005, there could be more serious inventory problems. "We were building at a pace that we did not expect to be sustained and we're seeing a slowdown," Markstein said. He expects builders to slow their pace of construction to meet the softer demand. However, many builders aren't cutting back, and are instead talking about opening many new communities in order to drive order growth. Toll Brothers, for example, plans to open 80 communities during the next six months, and expects to wrap up fiscal 2006 with 295 subdivisions, up from 230 in fiscal 2005. Chairman Toll sees the glut of inventory on the market as a "short-term phenomena" and believes the supply imbalance will correct "relatively soon." Despite the softening trends nationwide, Fitch Ratings analyst Bob Curran said he still believes the housing sector is heading for a soft landing - not a crash - and that the current housing slowdown is temporary and will likely rebound by late 2006 or early 2007. He said economic data for job growth and consumer confidence has been positive. "It would be highly unusual for housing to go into a multiyear tailspin when the general economy is holding up," he said. Curran noted that most of the publicly traded home builders are heavily weighted in big-growth markets, such as California, Phoenix, South Florida, and Washington, D.C., which experienced overheated demand and a spike in home prices during the past few years - and are now seeing the biggest weakness. As a result, the sharp slowdown in the hot markets makes the major builders "a little more vulnerable in the short term," he said. A slight slowdown in smaller markets won't make a huge difference for them, Curran said. "If you've got 25% of your assets in California, quibbling about what's happening in Salt Lake City isn't going to make a difference," he said. -By Janet Morrissey, Dow Jones Newswires; 201-938-2118 (END) Dow Jones Newswires 05-08-06 1222ET Copyright (c) 2006 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Facing falling sales, suburban Los Angeles real estate tries to re-invent itself...OWP 5/21/2006 12:00 AM Seller hopes model behavior will give homes lived-in appeal BY BRENT HOPKINS, Staff Writer LA Daily News SANTA CLARITA - The scent of baking scones wafts through the house as children's feet pound the floors. "Dad" rushes to get things ready as "Mom" lounges on the couch. It's a birthday party for Camille Chen. "Husband" Jaason Simmons has breakfast in the oven and there's about to be a surprise: He and the kids remodeled the den into a game room and won't Mom, a notorious poker fiend, be pleased. Except Chen and Simmons aren't married, the kids aren't theirs, they don't really live in the house and they're all Centex Homes marketing director Amanda Larson's employees. They've been hired to lounge around a model home, read magazines and occasionally pretend like they're having breakfast. Welcome to the new reality of real estate. Dallas-based Centex built four model homes, filled them with furniture, then took things one bizarre step further. The company hired four actors to play the role of a family, in a role that's half improv, half sales demo. Centex has 166 homes to sell in its Milestone development, starting at $507,500 and heading into the $600,000 range, and figured it needed just a little something extra to entice people to come check things out. On Saturday, Home Life made its debut for a public audience, with more than 100 visitors streaming through the faux family tableau. Some visitors seemed a little taken aback, but others joined right in with the birthday celebration. One family played along with the whole thing, asking how long Simmons and Chen had lived there, then turned chilly when asked questions by a reporter. Centex employees sat on the periphery, but no one seemed to question who they were or why they were there. If the concept proves successful, the company expects to employ it again at other developments. "Where does the reality end and the ... good God, reality begin?" mused Jim Garfield, a senior publicist for Roddan Paolucci Roddan, the Palos Verdes Estates-based advertising and public relations company that created Home Life. "It's exciting, scary and really unique, all at the same time. You sit at your desk and wonder, will people come, will it work, will people find it interesting and, most importantly, does it get the client's story out?" The client seems to think so, though Larson drew a line between Home Life and reality TV shows "Big Brother" and "The Real World." "This isn't reality real estate," she said, as the actors rehearsed at a walk-through on Thursday. "If you come back next week, Camille wouldn't have been voted out of the house. We didn't want to do a gimmicky thing, we just wanted to do something different." This seems odd - and the company acknowledges as much - but with the formerly white-hot real estate market looking decidedly cooler of late, nothing's too unusual to hook buyers. Just putting in leather couches and baking cookies won't do it anymore, at least in Centex's mind. To make the home-buying experience more real, the company felt it had to employ a very unreal strategy. It feels like reality TV, except there's no TV. Call it reality reality, then: reality filtered through a highly choreographed scenario. It's completely engineered to make the viewers feel like it could be them eating breakfast together and debating what sort of dog to adopt. Schnoodle or cockapoo? Not a retriever - everyone's got those. Like many families in Santa Clarita, they're young - so young that when 13-year-old Danny Devan asks Chen, who plays her mother, which birthday they're celebrating, Simmons glosses it over. The actresses are 13 years apart in age, which "Dad" nimbly dodges, saying, "Darling, let's not talk about your mom's younger days, shall we?" They're also multiracial and very good-looking. Simmons, a Tasmanian who did a stint on "Baywatch," looks unusually like his fake kids, who are of German and Filipino parentage. Chen, who's awaiting news on whether her television pilot got picked up, hails from Taiwan. In just about the only bit of reality involved, Danny and Colin Robert are, in fact, brother and sister. This could also explain why they're so good at pretending to argue. The kids were all smiles and Mom and Dad were happily celebrating her birthday for the fourth time when Kevin Miller sat down at their table. The Santa Clarita resident, a real estate agent by trade, came out, curious to see the show. He spoke to Chen, likening the experience to a play in which the audience takes part. He then spoke to Mom and wished her a happy birthday. "It warms up the house," he said after the scene played out. "It makes the whole thing seem more intimate than `Here's the brochure, here's the floor plan, go look around."' That taps right into a key part of consumers' minds, according to Debbie MacInnis, vice dean of research at the USC Marshall School of Business. Buying a home becomes one of the most complex, emotional decisions a person makes, so any way to hook a wavering shopper becomes an advantage. "You imagine yourself in this situation," MacInnis said. "If you have a beautiful experience, that gets people to think, oh, I want to live like that!" And, by extension, "I want to buy this place." With houses sitting unsold longer these days, it might not be such a crazy idea. "The market isn't what it was last year, that's for sure," said Linda Slocum, a local Realtor with Fred Sands of Valencia. "Most of the new home builders have inventory now, so maybe they feel that this is something they have to do. Some of them are having little barbecues or things like that, but that's pretty standard. There's nothing like this, though." But, hey, that's California for you. In the state that gave birth to Hollywood and Disneyland, the major purveyors of moderated reality, this isn't such a big stretch. As her actual kids pretended to celebrate their fake mom's birthday, Musette Caing leafed through a beauty magazine and laughed that this sort of thing would not fly back in Michigan. Very California, she said, very Disney. "It's like watching a live TV show, only there, you're only watching from one angle and here, I can go in the other room, do anything I want, see what I want," she said. "It's almost like you're a ghost." brent.hopkins@dailynews.com
It's getting UGLY today...KBH just broke a six year uptrend this morning. Extreme technical damage all around this asset class...OWP
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