Archive for February, 2009

By STEVE BROWNOne of North Texas’ largest homebuilders is suspending operations because of the tight credit markets.

Choice Homes, which has been in business for 21 years, is the latest in a string of local builders forced to shut down because of the lack of lending.

The Irving-based high production builder constructed more than 580 houses in the Dallas-Fort Worth area last year.

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By STEVE BROWN / The Dallas Morning News
stevebrown@dallasnews.com The pace of home price declines increased in Dallas at the end of 2008.

Dallas-area home prices were down 4.3 percent from a year earlier in the December Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller Home Price Index.

The Dallas decline – while higher than in previous months – was just a fraction of the record 18.5 percent nationwide home price decline, according to the report released Tuesday.

“The broad downturn in the residential real estate market continues,” Standard & Poor’s David M. Blitzer said in the report. “There are very few, if any, pockets of turnaround that one can see in the data.

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Associated Press

Shares of several major homebuilders declined Wednesday as new data showed home construction fell far more than expected last month and the Obama administration unveiled details of its $75 billion mortgage relief plan.

The Commerce Department reported that construction of new homes and apartments fell 16.8 percent in January to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 446,000 units - well below the 530,000 units economists expected.

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5. Dallas, Texas

2008 total building permits: 26,145

In a year when permits declined 35 percent nationally, Dallas only experienced a 9 percent fall-off. With a population of 4.3 million, Dallas was the third largest home building market last year, as measured in permits pulled. Employers in Dallas, a popular place for corporate relocation and expansion, added 42,000 jobs last year, a growth rate of 2 percent. Existing-home prices have held steady, falling a paltry 3.4 percent in the last year. Interestingly, the face of residential construction has changed dramatically in Dallas in recent years; 58 percent of the activity last year was in multifamily, compared to a five-year average of 23 percent. The relative stability of the market, though, wasn’t enough to prevent Wall Homes from filing for bankruptcy earlier this year. On the other hand, former Meritage co-CEO John Landon recently started a new Dallas-based home building company.

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by John Clinkard

While there is clear evidence that economic conditions in most metro areas across the U.S. have deteriorated sharply over the past year, the Dallas-Fort Worth economy has fared better than most, so far. This view is based on the fact that, over the past year, the rate of job growth in the “Big D” (+1.6%) has been faster than all but two of the fifty largest metro areas in the country and well above the national average. The other two strong employment-growth cities are also in Texas − Houston (+2.1% year over year) and San Antonio (+2.0%).

Across major industries, significant increases in job growth occurred in education and health services (+4.4%), leisure and hospitality services (+3.5%) and government services (+2.9%). Moreover, despite a sharp drop in single-family homebuilding, employment in construction is up by 2.4% year over year in December, due primarily to sustained multi-family construction and a very healthy pace of commercial building.

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By Helen Chernikoff - Analysis

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Things are about to get tough for homebuilders in Texas, which until now has been a rare safe haven for recession-battered builders.

The second-largest state both in area and population, Texas has bucked the broader downturn because it did not experience the price bubble and resulting overbuilding that inflated housing markets in states such as California, Florida and Nevada.

But now, declining prices in oil and natural gas — key industries in the Lone Star state — are beginning to impact the state’s housing market, and experts are predicting a rougher road.

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By STEVE BROWN / The Dallas Morning News
stevebrown@dallasnews.com

North Texas’ two biggest homebuilders – Centex Corp. and D.R. Horton Inc. – continued to lose money in the final months of 2008.

But the firms’ losses were less than in previous quarters.

Dallas-based Centex said late Tuesday that it lost $663.9 million, or $5.34 per share, in the quarter ended Dec. 31. That’s down from a $975.2 million, or $7.95 per share, loss in the year-earlier period.

“Although the declining economy caused unprecedented buyer hesitancy early in the quarter, we successfully adjusted to the difficult sales environment and made progress on key initiatives,” Centex chief executive Timothy R. Eller said in a statement.

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