Toll Bros. profit plunges 67% as home sales fall

Toll Bros. (TOL), the largest U.S. luxury-home builder, said Thursday that fiscal first-quarter profit slid 67% on expenses to write down the value of land after a year of plummeting new-home sales.

Net income fell to $54.3 million, or 33 cents a share, from $164 million, or 98 cents, a year earlier, Horsham, Pa.-based Toll said.

Toll cut its profit forecast and lowered its estimate for home deliveries as orders slumped.

"There are too many soft markets at this stage of the selling season to call a general upturn in the new home market," CEO Robert Toll said.

"The high end of the market is still very weak," said John Tomlinson, an analyst at Majestic Research. "The land write-downs weren't as drastic as they signaled they could be, but there's a great deal of uncertainty about future write-downs."

Shares of Toll fell 93 cents, or 3.8%, to $31.93 Thursday on the New York Stock Exchange. The stock absorbed the second-sharpest decline in a Standard & Poor's gauge of 16 home builders. Toll shares have fallen 1.7% in the past year, compared with a 23% decline in the index. More...

http://www.usatoday.com/money/companies/earnings/2007-02-22-toll-bros_x.htm

houses for the time being?

They are buying them in Belize and Tuscany instead.

People who have real wealth aren't going to buy crap that's marketed to "upper-middle class" people who are going into debt because they don't save. Plus, Toll Bros. houses are generic and of poor quality.

Don't know that I'd call them generic. I can't speak to quality since I haven't owned one, but they look very nice.

http://www.tollbrothers.com/homesearch/servlet/HomeSearch?app=community_models&comm_num=4825

damn thems some nice lookin' houses

those are NOT nice looking homes. its fear-based architecture, jumping up & down so it will attract attention.

calm down:

Real bad recession hasn't hit yet. Rich folks (lot of home builders) vote R, thinking that, R is the one who is on their side. I just shake my head.

Too many people jumped in so they wouldn't be "priced out of the market forever"...after all, house values "ALWAYS GO UP, NEVER DOWN" ...at least that is what has been fed to to people over the years by the NAR & the MSM. Too many people saw housing as the stock market, invest, make a quick buck, move up, do it again....only now they are caught with their pants down. Its going to get ugly before the year is over.

i would love to know how much unsold inventory is sitting in their developments. Many home builders did far too much spec building imo.

Masco is amongst the largest building supply firms in the US - they are about to cut 16% of their workforce. When this recession hits I wonder how the Repugs will blame it on Democrats??

"trickle down economics" the gop loves so much, it sucks when it goes the other way.

:sarcasm: :sarcasm:

Dem President and the congress then fully controlled by an overwhelming majority of Democrats for the recession. Their one day in control will be enough.

A Toll is one of the fascists that bought the Philly Inquirer and is turning it even further to the right.

I can't stand to read the Inky anymore. They have a whole stable of RW blowhards and no balance whatsoever. :puke:

heh.

:toast:

I'm sure they would sell like hotcakes.

Quelle horror!

giant homes they borrowed to get that lost their value while they threw the rest of their money out the window on giant boats and tens of thousands a year country club memberships. These are upper level professionals making their money off their backs(working) and not off their investments. And of course spending it as fast as they got it.

Okay, knew it would happen.

Reading a bit of economic history is not a bad way to spend a few hours if one wishes to understand why some industries predictably swing through periods of boom and bust.

Preferably, history written by someone without a political ax to grind... :-)

It is my opinion that the shrinking of the middle class is putting an end to all of those 'economic cycles' that used to happen. And they won't be back until changes are made that expands the middle class.

These things don't just happen magically. There are mechanisms behind them.

when he says these people are doing the jobs that Americans won't. And with the outsourcing of all white collar jobs that can be digitized, the American public won't be able to buy those Mac Mansions off the salary of a WalMart greeter. The corporations know all of this of course, but they are just milking the American slums now. But hey, Bangalore India and China are doing great. The joke in Bangalore is when you are teeing off on the second hole, you aim between the IBM and the Microsoft buildings. The third hole you shoot between Apple and Intel, the fifth is GE and HP.

Nothing has put an end to all of those 'economic cycles' that "used to happen". That sounds remarkably similar to those people who said during the late 90's that the old rules of turning a profit, P/E ratios, cash flow and the like didn't matter anymore in the new Internet Economy. Stocks were just going to keep rising. We see where that line of thinking got us.

The end of cheap petroleum and natural gas changes everything.

US given the massive shift of the manufacturing base, outsourcing, and insourcing. The world's economic leaders and investors seriously disagree with your thesis. If the money managers around the world were betting on the US, the value of the dollar would not be declining with respect to ALL major currencies.

The Roman equivalent of the Republicans thought the Roman Empire was just dandy. Bush, err Nero, playing the fiddle. All smart money is moving to China, the next superpower of the 21st Century.

the classic boom and bust cycle of "good'ole capitalism". One wouldn't have to think too hard to realize that some degree of managed economy would benefit us more than this silly shell game, but people still think this crap is the only "moral" way to run an economy. When will we ever learn? Economic freedom should be balanced against a stable social model that doesn't reward the greedy while harming the young and the less fortunate. That sounds moral.


(edited for spelling)

As for centrally-managed economies, I don't see much historical evidence of their superiority.

To recall the most obvious example, the USSR is gone, and nearly all of its Eastern European satellites threw out centrally-managed economies the first moment they got the chance. Hundreds of millions of people spent decades trying to make that system work, and all it created was austerity or worse for the proles, while the privileged classes laughed quietly into their wine glasses.

Ask a typical Pole or Czech or Romanian which system they prefer.

I'm against laissez-faire capitalism and its excesses, and believe in strong laws to keep them in check. But clearly the example of the Western democracies shows that systems based on personal initiative increase living standards, relative to other systems. A higher living standard means fewer poverty-related miseries and mortalities. That sounds moral to me.

Despite popular misconceptions, the U.S., Canada, Australia, and Western Europe (to name a few) are all mixed economies, with large degrees of government intervention, regulation, and management. Whether or not we need more or less of this government involvement is good food for discussion.

I believe that we can best advance progressive ideals when we have a continuing source of funds to pay for them.

Peace.

generic, cookie cutter flimsy McMansions to be sold at inflated prices to unsuspecting buyers. They bulldoze woodlands, buy up the most beautiful acreages with no thought to environmental impact or community needs, and pave them over with steroidal schlock. Who'd want one of these monuments to excess consumption?

I hope people just get wise and stop buying them.

:puke: :puke: :puke: :puke: :puke: :puke: :puke: :puke:

as they're not going to increase in value over the years. Shoddy construction, inefficient and high energy costs will make these suburban McMansions obsolete in the next decade.

they'll be chopping these behemoths up into multiple units and retrofitting for greater energy efficiency before too long.

What a disastrous period of building in America. It was so easy to convince everyone that this is the norm and they need one. There was never a more definitive term than "McMansion."

A landscape littered by dilapidated poorly built homes.

My little house built almost 100 years ago will still be standing when these abominations are falling apart.

But then again, maybe not. I begin to think the market has no fundamentals and is being propped up by ??????