Home Builders Stocks are starting to Improve
According to the Wall Street Journal on January 7, 2010 Lennar and KB Home should see an improvement in their stock prices this year. Deutsche Bank analyst Nishu Sood on Monday raised his earnings forecast for both firms. Credit6 Suisse analyst Daniel Oppenheim upgraded Lennar to “outperform” from “Neutral” in November and raised its target price to $16 from a range of $12-14. Analysts are expecting Lennar to report a turnaround and a possible return to a profit in over a year which would be great for them. This would help get investors buying their stock again.
Last month’s new home sales report showed inventories of unsold homes fell to a seasonally adjusted 235,000 in November which is the lowest since 1971 according to HIS Global Insight. Homes in our MLS were up over 85% but the majority of these homes were not new. We have seen a steady increase since July. We are glad that 2009 is over and look forward to a great 2010! If buyers hold off much longer, they will miss a golden opportunity.
Jan 11th, 2010 at 12:55 pm
I agree, Larry. It seems even here in St. Louis, that people are skeptical to purchase homes. There’s several rumors flying around that home prices will drop with the tax credit ends, and people are failing to notice that although sales aren’t the way they were 3 years ago, they’re improving. Missouri just announced a $1250 property tax credit for new home buyers and a $500 incentive for installing energy efficient appliances in new homes!
Jan 11th, 2010 at 3:22 pm
Hi Elizabeth,
Yes, we have just completed an analysis of our MLS for last year compared to 2006 numbers and we were down a little over 61% in dollars. However, when you look at month to month for 2009; we have seen an increase every month since July and we were up over 85% in November over the same month for a year ago. In our area, we have very little first time home buyers and the area that we have seen the biggest increase are condos; that are hard to finance because the banks do not want to loan money on. The majority of people buying realize the great deals that are availble and either pay cash or use the equity from their homes. We hope our state comes up with something like your state because we have to get construction going again.