Archive for the ‘When the going gets tough’ tag
When the going gets tough in the homebuilding industry…
“When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going” is a saying attributed to Joan W. Donaldson as well as a popular song originally recorded by Billy Ocean and used as the theme song for the film, The Jewel of the Nile. I believe that this is now truer than ever for everyone in the homebuilding industry.
Most of the housing markets across the country have reached bottom and are now ready to begin a slow but steady recovery. Household formations are still lagging due to the lack of meaningful employment growth but population growth is continuing at strong levels and will return our industry to health and over 1,500,000 annual housing starts nationally by the end of the decade.
Things are certainly still tough out there in many places and it may still be as long as three to four years before we see the meaningful signs of a housing recovery in our own markets that will start to “naturally” return our levels of new home sales and our incomes to the levels that we enjoyed just a few years ago.
Last week a salesperson at a development that I was shopping complained that traffic had slowed considerably since the tax credit ended and she was not selling any homes. A prospective homebuilder client with whom I have been in contact for several years told me this week that the market was slow and he had decided to “just wait it out”. And a developer client informed me yesterday that he was not “giving away” his homesites and would just hold on the best that he could until the market returns.
Inaction is simply not a solution; it is a self-fulfilling prophesy for failure. Read the rest of this entry »
