Stock Watch
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From PROSALES, by Craig Webb–Stock Building Supply’s business is a shadow of what it was about 24 months ago, and so the company’s new private equity majority owner the Gores Group wants to make its costs a shadow of what they once were.
With an assist from a Delaware bankruptcy court decision, Gores will get satisfaction on one of its key conditions in its distress-sale purchase of Stock from UK-based Wolseley Plc. A judge approved termination of more than 200 leases Stock had contracted for during its run-up years, 2005-to-2007, a move tantamount to cramming down what Stock would have had to pay to maintain the leases.
ProSales magazine editor Craig Webb has Stock coverage of the judge’s resolution, as well as analysis of Wolseley financials for Stock operations for the latest reporting period.
Fix Housing Later
Unemployment is the chicken. Foreclosures are the egg. Swap their positions all you like. They’re each a self-fulfilling prophecy of the other, a negative feedback loop.
Housing leaders and housing-centric economists want to believe housing always leads the economy. Fix housing, they say, and you’re on your way to fixing the broader economy, because housing is an engine with a multiplier effect. Residential investment dollars–including construction costs for all kinds of housing–redouble and stream into many other markets and cause good things to happen in local, regional, and national economies.
This time though, a consensus is building that housing will not lead the way out of the downturn. Housing is not broken. Creation of demand is. Look at the latest unemployment data. Now, look at how foreclosures are working, i.e. 54% of new foreclosures are prime fixed and adjustable rate mortgages from among the lowest risk borrowers, per this analysis by Calculated Risk.
How about this for an argument? Housing, not only will not lead an economic recovery, it should not. Business Week economist Mike Mandel makes a case that a housing snapback would drain needed investment from other industry and service sectors that would put a more solid structure–including healthcare, education, and manufacturing–under the economy.
Here’s a few-minute video from Mandel on his Fix Housing Later theory.
Clearly, a more normalized level of demand for housing–existing, new, for-sale, and for-rent–would shape itself around less cyclical job growth in non-housing industry arenas. Businesses that got burnt badly as they met hyperbolic, investor-driven demand. In a real sense, housing’s 15 year run before 2006 used up a couple of the wild cards that would have jump started the economy, and pulled forward buyers into homeownership that it would be nice to have in the demand pool right now.
So, even as new residential construction business executives begin to populate their sound bites these days with flashes of wishful thinking, practically the only silver lining in today’s new one-family home sales data is that builders knocked 12 days of inventory off the books, reducing the ready supply of new homes nationally by 13,000 to 297,000.
In some markets, like Phoenix, home builder and developer sentiment has shifted from “you-have-to-fake-it-to-make-it” to that of genuine excitement. “They’ve turned the lights back on” in the land acquisition conference rooms, according to an executive with ties to investor and home builder land transactions.
What’s selling will have to continue to compete with foreclosures, super affordable to migrate renters across into homeownership. No contingencies. No funny business on the mortgage–it’s either FHA qualified, or at least 20% down. Delinquencies and defaults will pile up among prime and Alt-A borrowers for months and months to come, thanks to an unemployment rate expected to grow into the double digits before it starts to ease back by the end of 2010.
Get stocks to start parking in a promise of future growth, and a real economy GDP to inch back from its deep 6 to something around 0 this year, and by golly, consumer sentiment will start a real recovery.
Meanwhile, another year of trying to figure out how to do things with less people than you really need. What we all need though is an economy that can sustainably grow again, not one heated back up by housing. Fix Demand First, housing later.
Who’s Your Goliath?
My dad is and always was a fan of underdogs.
Before sports went berzerkly corporate, and all the New York team owners felt that it was their Manifest Destiny to use zillions of dollars to wrest championship rings from their wearers in other towns and bring them to the Big Apple, my father parked his loyalties solidly behind the longshots like the pre-Dave Debusschere Knicks against the Bill Russell-led Celtics, and the 1964 football Giants with a creaky Y.A. Tittle at the helm, and a new baseball team called the Mets.
So I got it from him.
Click for more info on Malcolm Gladwell
Which is why Malcolm Gladwell’s piece in the May 11, 2009 issue of The New Yorker was a must read. As is Gladwell’s typical article approach, blending historical research with a latter day examplar of a noteworthy phenomenon, it’s a scholarly deconstruction of a twist of fate, “How David Beats Goliath.”
For two reasons, the story should interest those of us whose fortunes or loss of them tie to the new residential construction market.
The first is that the central theme of the story relates to the plight of many organizations who make a living or not in the world of housing. They are David. Foremost, Goliath–the Philistine warrier whose defeat is almost inconceivable–is a real estate market and general economy withering in their effect on combatants large and small.
Gladwell’s yarn–backed by political science data on the number of wars won by undermanned, less powerful armies through history–tells how an underdog gets the upper hand. First thing they have to do is recognize they’re weaker and choose an unconventional strategy.
“When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s rules, they win.”
Think Lawrence of Arabia; think Rick Pitino, or if you’re my dad, think Digger Phelps’ Fordham University [no name] Rams against a U Mass team led by Julius “Dr. J.” Erving. The unconventional approach often involves surprise and speed, causing confusion in the ranks of a more potent foe.
Surprise and speed, for home builders, translates into cash. Let everyone else remain paralyzed in a market debatably still deteriorating [or as the Caculated Risk blog asserts, "correcting"], and girding for further waves of foreclosure hell. Don’t play by the rules of the game that you have to price a new home to market. What’s the equivalent for home builders of a full-court press? Is it an Open Series or any number of the other companies’ new, more affordable floorplans that break previously ironclad rules about replacement costs? How do you change your company’s culture so that it can adapt and change its structure?
The other reason to read the article might just be to come to a new understanding of who Goliath really is. Certainly, at the moment, the barbaric, dreaded enemy in most of our minds is a marketplace of still halting consumer confidence, corporate fear of investment, and massive government overcompensation for the ills of free enterprise.
Interestingly, though, a subplot of the article focuses on another kind of David. In this case, it’s Vivek Ranadive, a Silicon Valley software developer who revolutionized data analysis by moving from “batch” collection to real time collection.
What has led and will likely lead many a real estate and residential construction company down the road to ruin is the absence of reliable data to say what is actually going on in the market. There are too many lagging indicators and undependable metrics that allow analysts to assert “the fundamentals are strong” and the “subprime damage can be contained.”
So, in a sense, Goliath is not only an outside force in the marketplace, but an enemy within. Data that is as local as the Census tract you’re competiting in and as instructive as a clock with the correct time is something most real estate players haven’t gotten around to developing or developing a belief in.
Some times, rules that need breaking are ones we’ve made up for ourselves.
Until a megalomaniac named George Steinbrenner came along, my father’s one exception to pulling for the underdog was his love of the New York Yankees. He knew lifetime and year-to-date averages and ERAs of most of the Yankees from about 1935 through The Mick and Whitey Ford.
But even when they were dominant, the Yanks had kind of an underdog’s salt of the earth sense about them. After all, one of the best of them said this. “The future ain’t what it used to be.” Bet you’ll never guess who.
Going Non-Postal
Friends,
We’re taking off for vacation this evening, doing our part to help the global economy recover. We’ll spend freely, eat to excess, and revel in some of the highest achievements of human ingenuity, ambition, and aspiration in Rome and Florence.
We’ll be off the grid from tonight, May 15, through Sunday, May 24, with nary a post to offer on the Housing Crisis.
Meanwhile, in our absence, we invite comments and questions regarding any previous posts, and we offer one additional thought.
In the days ahead, as many of us become more acutely mindful of the tremendous gift and sacrifice of the men and women of the United States armed services working for us in all parts of the globe, lets make it our business to keep them more constantly in our minds and hearts.
The fruit of their work, their offering, and their success is our freedom. Economic crisis or not, we’ll get through it all if we have our freedom.
We thank and honor them.
Home builders rework how they offer value
Home building’s leading business executives have a message for the public. The message is this: We’ll meet you there, where you can feel confident in a new-home purchase right now.
Several dozen of those executives met this week in Chicago for the annual Builder 100 conference. If any of them had spent time in the fetal position during any part of the last two-plus years, you would never have been able to tell. A resilient bunch, although one whose ranks are sorely diminished and still shrinking.
Click image for access to Builder Executive of the Year article.
For those who were at the conference, a shining, if symbolic, moment of resilience was Pulte chief executive officer Richard Dugas braving a public appearance as Builder’s Executive of the Year despite an angry crowd of labor union protestors clamoring on the street outside the conference venue. Protesters brought their signature oversized inflatable pig and stood it among them as they picketed the hotel on East Superior Street. Dugas stood tall and talked of the determination of his company’s people to weather the balance of the economic storm and emerge an even stronger firm.
For those who were unable to attend the conference, it should be noted the mood was realistic; the consensus was that traffic and sales are up; there’s lots more work to do; and bigger opportunities are beginning to reveal themselves.
For two solid days, they talked about their message to the public: “We’ll meet you a good part of the way there.” They talked about what they want–mostly good headlines–and what they’re going to do about it next, give new meaning to the word “value.”
Value has been the missing link in the real economy and the housing economy. Loan-to-value. Cost value. Time value. Never missing a beat, however, has been the value of people. People, home building’s thought and practice leaders refrained over and over, are where you get value. It’s the one and only way to get home builders’ house offerings a good part of the way there for the public to feel confident about buying right now.
Builder 100 executives talked over and over about people, about ones they’ve lost, and ones they have fought to keep. People are where smarter processes and better margins and more persuasive selling occur. People are positive cash flow versus the incessant erosion of hard assets like land and invested capital. People are the only difference between sheer price reductions and value.
Every home builder there was talking about offering value. It’s practically a euphemism for offering lower cost products to home buyers who are stuck in a Catch-22 credit environment. The industry’s most dramatic gesture to date–the Pulte acquisition of Centex–is strategically a play for value. Pulte’s acknowledging, in part, that it needs a value brand in its portfolio, not just for now, but especially now as a ramp to recovery.
Pulte’s not alone. We’re seeing practically every company, from KB Home, to Meritage, to D.R. Horton, to Jagoe Homes, put greater emphasis on value. This means killing frills, figuring out smarter ways to buy materials and manufactured goods to put in the homes, and building faster yet with higher quality to cut down both on trades time and warranty issues.
The third key part of the new value proposition home building executives were focused on at Builder 100 is green. Clearly though, green as a business issue versus green as an altruistic motivation. More and more home builders, most of the bigger enterprises and an increasing number of regional and local companies including Artistic Homes in Albuquerque, and Hearthstone Homes of Omaha, are building energy efficiency beyond code into their homes.
There are a couple of reasons for this right now, and they’re related business objectives. One is the struggle to find any possible point of difference from competitors in their marketplace, and the other is to strike potential home buyers with a money-saving and emotional reason to buy, and get them to regard the “total cost of homeownership”–mortgage payments plus payments for utilities and other regular maintenance costs–as a new-home benefit. We learn at the Builder 100, of course, that the mortgage finance sector has apparently never heard of or been regardful of the “total cost of homeownership.” So when a buyer can get approved for a $200,000 home, but pays through the nose for utilities and other costs, the bank is unaware. But the same lender would scarcely approve that same buyer for a $250,000 loan for a new home that would save more than $50,000 in utility and maintenance costs during the term of the loan.
People, value, and green. These are the issues we’ll continue to focus on in the months ahead. Cracking the code of value–which home builders have begun to do with their new entry-level and other segment offerings–is how home builders can be confident in their simple message to the public: We’ll meet you there.
The Dash for Cash
We are still on our uncertainty kick, as it’s the only lasting phenomenon we both be certain of and need to plan around.
Consider a comment from investment guru Jeremy Grantham in an analysis The Big Picture blog’s Barry Ritholz is raving about for its keen guidance on “what we should expect over the next few years.”
“The uncertainties of the economy are so great that when the uncertainties of the stock market’s anticipation are laid on top of them, you simply must have big ranges of outcomes and hedge your bets.”
In home building, we see parallels to this principle.
The first quarter of 2009 has now made it clear that, by violently turning the screws on their gross margins, public home builders can at least stir the pot on home sale volumes, especially if it’s the right time of year and there are a couple of “x” factors like a California home buyer tax credit around to help.
Here’s how Citigroup’s home building sector equity analyst Josh Levin puts it.
While most investors entered [the just-concluded] earnings season focused on y-o-y (year-on-year) net orders, we think many were surprised by the q-o-q (quarter-on-quarter) gross margin deterioration reported by most home builders.
In the next three quarters of 2009–especially after there are no more $10,000 tax credits to hand out to Californians who step up to buy now–home building companies will be left even more to their own devices to get the job done moving inventory.
Seasonal forces, rock-bottom prices, record-low interest rates, and money back on income taxes for a home purchase have been working.
Take away seasonality, and add back the toll of continued economic weakness leading to a weak recovery, big layoff numbers, another wave–maybe two–of credit meltdown shocks in the form of widening credit card defaults and commercial real estate implosions, and one can get a sense of genuine challenges to the kind of consumer confidence it takes to make that largest of consumer purchases.
Home building companies that have made it to this point with a truck load of cash need a plan to try to expand their “range of outcomes,” even as they hedge their bets.
A truck load of cash, a delevered balance sheet, a skeleton-crew cost structure, a few tax-carryback induced inventory turns, and few if any false moves, serve as Part I of the plan–the part that has gotten the stronger companies to where they feel they still have cards left to play.
Part II is where a broader ”range of outcomes” comes clear, because even the stronger companies can’t sit around for the next three quarters waiting for the home buyer market to suddenly tilt their way. Both public and private companies with cash will in the next several months begin to try to slide in unobserved to pick of lots that pencil to new hurdle rates. Those lots, and the business plan around them, and the product on them, will all have one mission. Generate cash from sales.
Whatever goes on by virtue of “the visible hand” of government, home building operators need just one more critical part of the downturn’s plot line to kick into effect. Capitulation. “Ask” prices need to succumb finally to new, uncertain, sustainedly weak realities. And they will, but first only discreetly.
So, what we’ll be observing, even as clouds of uncertainty continue to sit over residential construction’s landscape, is the beginning of chapter that will see home buyers pop in and buy land, hoping finally that it’s cheap enough that they can put a home on it with one of their existing or new products that will get them inventory turns at a greater than one-or-two-a-month pace by the end of 2009.
We invite you now to jam our comment box with questions and challenges for leading home building executives, either about their companies, about the markets they operate in, or about the business environment ahead. who’ll gather in Chicago over the next several days for the 2009 Builder 100 Conference.
We hope to see you there, but if not there, then let us know here what you want to have these folks address in the days ahead.
Bottom Fishy
Are you the glass-is-half-full type, or a life-stinks-then-you-die kind?
A whiff of less-bad news here and there has bred with it a subtle change of expectations on the part of some economists, if not the eventualities themselves.
Clearly, though, economists are best at using two words to begin talking about even their strongest convicitons. Those two words? “It depends.”
Here’s a roll-up of economists’ opinions from the Orange Country Register’s “Lansner on Real Estate” that limbs out the Silver Liners from the Doom and Gloomers as to when that most-coveted of pieces of bottom might be in view.
Optimists
Fed Chair Bernanke:
- The worst of the recession has passed: “We continue to expect economic activity to bottom out, then to turn up later this year.”
Mark Zandi, chief economist, Moody’s Ecomomy.com:
- U.S. home prices will reach bottom by the end of 2009.
- “Notwithstanding the intensifying economic gloom, the bottom of the housing downturn is within sight.”
- U.S. home prices will fall another 11 percent on average before stabilizing.
- The Case- Shiller home price index will fall 36 percent from its 2006 peak to the bottom this year.
UCLA Anderson Forecast:
- Housing market to stabilize in late 2009, and “when it does, the contraction in residential construction will, finally, after more than three years, cease to be a drag on the California economy.”
- “As the housing market has completed most of its required adjustment prior to the downturn in general economic activity, it will not be as much of a drag on the recovery as experienced in previous recessions.”
- Orange County: Home prices stabilizing in 2009 and starting to rise in 2010. But appreciation rates remain in the single digits and prices will still be at 2004 levels in 2013.
- “This could well be the worst post-WWII downturn yet.”
- “If there is any good news in the picture it is that the correction in the housing market is almost complete.”
- “We are due for significant increases in unemployment through the 2nd quarter of 2010.”
- “Continued job loss in California is going to lead to more foreclosures and more uncertainty about the ultimate bottom in housing prices.”
California Association of Realtors:
- Recessionary conditions through the first half of 2009, “before we begin to see a turnaround in the second half of next year.”
- Prices down 28.4%. That’s revised from an earlier projection that prices would drop just 6% this year.
- Sales up 25%. CAR forecasts that 550,000 homes will sell in 2009, pretty good considering that the state was down to 347,000 sales a year in 2007. That’s revised from an earlier projection of 445,000 home sales.
Pessimists
Michael Carney, director, Real Estate Research Council of Southern California, Cal Poly Pomona:
- “I don’t see home prices leveling off in 2010. … The real reason we’re not going to see a recovery: The financing is not coming back for at least 5 years.”
Richard Green, director, USC Lusk Center for Real Estate:
- “I’d say we’re at bottom if it weren’t for the fact that the jobs picture is so dim.” … (Thinks market will turn around in 2010.)
Stan Humphries, VP of data and analytics, Zillow:
- “I’m doubtful that we’ll see the bottom until 2010, and thereafter it’s increasingly clear that we’re likely to have a long bottom before we see meaningful recovery in home values.”
Construction Industry Research Board:
- 2009 is expected to be the worst year on record for new residential building permits.
- Just 63,400 units will be produced in 2009, down 3% from the 2008 record-low of 65,380 units.
- 2008 construction was 20% lower than the lowest point during either the 1980s or 1990s housing downturns.
- The low in the early ’90s recession was 84,656 units in ’93. The worst year during the early ’80s recession was 85,656 in 1982.
Freddie Mac’aganda
Freddie Mac doesn’t want the bad guys to get too many people. Somebody’s got to be left standing to pay the tax freight in the years ahead.
So, here’s what they’re doing to take one for the team: Making Home Affordable and Avoiding Foreclosure Rescue Scams.
Enjoy.
Fannie Kicked in Q1; Mission Position to Blame
Just about six of every $10 Fannie Mae suffered in credit losses in the first quarter of 2009 come from a four-state real estate cataclysm–Arizona, California, Florida, and Nevada.
The Wall Street Journal reports the reason for Fannie’s Q1 woes as follows:
Fannie’s loss was mainly due to a provision of $20.3 billion for future credit losses stemming from the biggest wave of foreclosures since the 1930s. The company also had $5.7 billion of write-downs on mortgage securities created by Wall Street firms and lenders during the housing boom. These securities are backed by subprime and Alt-A mortgages. Subprime mortgages are those to people with poor bill-paying records or high debt in relation to their income, while Alt-A loans typically allowed borrowers to avoid documenting their income or assets.
Subprime and Alt-A loans have been by far the worst performers. But Fannie said its entire loan-guarantee business, including prime loans, is suffering from rising defaults as house prices fall and unemployment climbs.
Fannie and Freddie, which buy home loans from banks and turn most of them into securities for sale to other investors, are suffering huge losses largely because their only businesses are investing in or guaranteeing mortgages. Big banks, even ones with large mortgage exposures, are more diversified and benefited in the first quarter from a surge in mortgage refinancing, which helped offset credit losses.
The Calculated Risk blog digs deeper into Fannie’s 10-Q filing with the SEC, which points up a maze of self-cancelling strategic objectives that would reduce even the most illuminated of organizations to paralysis.
CNBC’s David Faber got out ahead of Fannie Mae’s earnings reporting with this analysis this morning.
Freddie reports next week.
ProSales Rules Stock Analysis
There is one place to go for insight into the lumber and building materials sector’s most dramatic story of the moment.
ProSalesmagazine.com has been the bleeding edge reporter on the collapse of Stock Building Supply–one of residential constuction’s juggernaut roll-up companies–from the time United Kingdom-based owner Wolseley Plc ran up the white flag of capitulation, to Wednesday’s sale of a 51% stake to private equity players, The Gores Group.
ProSales’ lineup of news and analysis on Stock’s stunning implosion and frantic survival tactics include a number of reports this week:
- Click for expert Stock analysis.
- Stock’s Revival Plan Calls for 2,200 More Job Cuts
- Bankruptcy Court Lets Stock Keep Running During Chapter 11 Story
- Stock’s New Majority Owner Looks to Grow Story
- Stock: Expect More Store Closures Story
- Chapter 11 filings and notices Link
- Information page on Stock’s website Link
- Timeline of Stock’s acquisitions since 1985 Link
- Wolseley Takes $262mln Hit on Stock Deal Story
- 51% of Stock Sold; Dealer Files Ch. 11 Story