Media Room

If your business suffers from real estate blues brought on by plummeting prices, it may come as little comfort to know that this trend was supposed to have ended by now. When the market began its downturn in early 2006, some of the smartest economists in the country, as well as the CEOs of major home-builders and the National Association of Realtors, predicted that prices would rebound by mid-2007.

For the full article click here.

The Phoenix metro is such a bellweather for the national housing market that if a big builder doesn't have a good year there, odds are it's not going to have a good year period. Pulte (PHM), for example, just reported a negative year-end quarter for 2006, and we now know that closings for its Del Webb subsidiary in Phoenix were down 26 percent last year.

The data comes from Frank Owens, a real estate industry figure in Phoenix and executive search consultant, who collected the numbers individually from 45 builders who are active in that market to create the propietary table below (the full spreadsheet is on Owens' site). You won't see these stats in the New York Times or Wall Street Journal because the big builders -- especially the publicly-traded ones -- rarely break out their activities by individual metros. ... for the full article click here.

"When I first met Rick Buss in the fall of 2005 he was working out of an office converted from a trailer home. A 37-year-old tech entrepreneur, he'd stepped up to take the job of City Manager of Maricopa, AZ, a freshly incorporated "boom village" south of Phoenix. He's been overseeing the nuts and bolts of the buildout of America's newest instant city. Maricopa has tripled its population to 28,000 since I saw Rick, and is projected to grow by more than 10 times that over the next two decades.

But right now it's in a dip in that trajectory: Rick provided an early confirmation of the prediction reported here two weeks ago by Frank Owens that the output of the major builders in the bellweather Phoenix market would be halved by next year." . . .for the full article and comments click here.

"I posted last week that Frank Owens, a pivotal player in the Phoenix housing market, estimated that volumes for the major builders there would be halved next year compared to 2005 -- and I later noted that it would actually be the third- and fourth-tier home builders who are going to be fighting for survival.

A proof to the theory surfaced this week. Turner Dunn Homes had filed for bankruptcy protection in the summer -- after stranding a pipeline with hundreds of homes in various stages of completion. They'd promised buyers, sub-contractors and creditors they'd get their act together in four months. They failed. Instead, an auctioneer is now liquidating *FIVE* entire Turner Dunn subdivsions. The newspapers don't seem to have picked up on this yet." . . . for the entire article and comments, click here.

But Phoenix is the industry's number one city based on activity, and the top market for the largest group of majors. It used to be that a metro was an 800-pound gorilla in the national housing market if half a dozen builders could do 1,000 units of annual inventory in the place. By that standard, Phoenix is now King Kong. Last year, nine builders recorded more than 2,000 closings each. Yes, Atlanta had more permits in total but only one builder -- Pulte -- came close to hitting the 2,000 mark in the Georgia capital.

Frank Owens, a housing industry headhunter in Phoenix who put many of the top executives at the home-builders there in their jobs, collated this ranking that shows the rise of Phoenix: . . for the entire article and comments, click here.