Housing - Land Report
With suitable tracts of land increasingly scarce, many builders have been scarfing up new sites in the Southeast and West at a dizzying pace in recent years. Pulte, for instance, now controls about 290,000 lots -- a seven-year supply, based on the 40,000 homes it expects to complete this year. Dallas-based Centex Corp. has a 76-month supply of land, roughly 18 months more than it had a year ago, notes Kathy Shanley, senior bond analyst at Gimme Credit, an institutional research service.
In the past year, however, the bidding for raw land in hot markets has become heated. In mid-May, Pulte outbid Toll Brothers Inc. (TOL ) and D.R. Horton Inc. (DHI ) when it paid a record $100.5 million for 276 acres at an Arizona state auction -- nearly three times the property's appraised value. And last June, 995 acres auctioned off by the Bureau of Land Management just outside Las Vegas went for $231,979 an acre -- a 46% jump over the previous year's auction and nearly three times the average of all earlier auctions.
businessweek.com
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