Home Builders See Bottom of Housing Slump
Home Builders See Bottom of Housing Slump
The year-long slump in the housing market may be near a bottom, say home builders – though it could take a while before prices rebound.
Toll Brothers (Charts) reported a sharp drop in fiscal fourth quarter earnings early Tuesday and forecast a big drop in profits for the coming year. But despite that bad news, chairman and CEO Robert Toll said that the market for new homes may finally be leveling off after more than a year's worth of declines.
"Fifteen months into the current slowdown, we may be seeing a floor in some markets where deposits and traffic, although erratic from week to week, seem to be dancing on the bottom or slightly above," said Toll in a statement accompanying the earnings report. "The metro D.C. suburbs of northern Virginia, which was the first market in which we saw activity slow, seems to have stabilized, although at levels much lower than those we have enjoyed over the past few years."
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