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Get Four
|  | OCTOBER 21, 2004
Homebuilders Are Stretched Thin Even as demand falls and inventories rise, they're taking on debt to boost construction and keep up their heady growth To the casual observer, the homebuilding industry appears to be in remarkably good shape this deep into the housing cycle: Most of the large publicly traded builders such as Lennar Corp. (LEN ) and KB Home (KBH ) are still reporting double-digit gains in both sales and profits. And most also still boast high returns on their investments. Los Angeles-based KB Home, for instance, is on a pace to earn 16% return on capital over the past year. "Other companies only dream about that," says KB Chief Financial Officer Dom Cecere. Yet despite those solid numbers, cracks are starting to form in the foundations of the nation's largest homebuilders. To maintain their heady growth rates, the big builders are placing ever-bigger bets as they continue adding to their land holdings and the number of houses they have under construction. BORROWING FRENZY. Even as the Federal Reserve has started raising interest rates -- while signaling that further hikes lie ahead -- builders have continued to throw up new homes at a furious pace. The amount of capital that the 14 largest publicly traded builders have tied up in inventories of unsold homes and land, adjusted for sales, has risen an average 12% over the past year, according to Palladian Research, a New York institutional research firm. As a result, those inventories now stand at the highest level relative to sales in seven years. And some builders are faring much worse than average. Inventories at Dominion Home (DHOM ) in Dublin, Ohio, for instance, have soared 38.8%, while Ryland Group (RYL ) in Calabasas, Calif., has seen them jump 30.6%. "They are increasingly running their businesses with an 'If we build it, they will come' mindset," says James D. Poyner, a market strategist at Palladian. To fund all this new construction, homebuilders are burning through cash at a furious pace. For the 12 months ended in June, the large publicly traded builders laid out $373 million more cash than they took in, Poyner notes. Compare that with the much more modest $73 million "burn rate" builders went through for the year that ended in June, 2003. That has left builders increasingly resorting to debt and stock issuance to fund their operations: Of the 14 largest publicly traded builders, six now have debt-to-equity ratios of 95% or higher, including Dominion and KB Home. OVERBLOWN FEARS. What concerns critics is that this frenzy of borrowing comes as housing demand is starting to cool: Single-family starts dipped 8.2% in September, to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.54 million units. Some Wall Street experts, such as Jan Hatzius, senior economist at Goldman Sachs (GS ), predict that single-family starts could slide an additional 10% to 20% in the coming year as higher rates take their bite. "The risks of a serious problem will rise the longer construction activity remains at its current elevated level," Hatzius wrote in an Oct. 15 report. Builders counter that fears of a housing crash are overblown. They argue that their land purchases are largely in the form of options that often require them to put down less than 10% of the value of the tracts; even then, they say they often build only when firm orders from buyers exist. What's more, builders contend that if demand cools, they'll have the wherewithal to scale back construction quickly -- and turn negative cash flows back into positive territory by simply selling down their existing inventory of finished homes. "When the market does slow down -- and our data doesn't show that it is slowing down -- our earnings might slow, but free cash flow will come in bucketloads at that point," says J. Larry Sorsby, chief financial officer for Hovnanian Enterprises Inc., a Red Bank (N.J.) builder.
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