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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TheStockFairy who wrote (18508)	3/11/2004 10:55:25 PM
From: Elroy Jetson	Respond to of 306849

I see Bruce Karatz at the BIA and other building industry functions. Everyone who is associated with home building knows what Karatz and Kaufman & Broad are like. I worked for a competing firm, Pardee Homes, for a while. I've seen K&B build on land no one else would touch: toxic waste sites; building sites which required more than 35 feet of fill (which never compact sufficiently to prevent settling; they've built on properties with seismic problems which the previous Mafia owners had removed from public records. Kaufman & Broad are in a league of their own. Even the predecessor firm owned by Eli Broad, which later went bankrupt, would never do post-sales repair work to the extent they needed to. A trail of litigation followed them. Pardee Homes, a Weyerhaeuser subsidiary, was a real class act. Having $2.5 billion in equity in the subsidiary of 200 employees plus a wealthy parent corporation helped. But most builders were diligent about what they turned out. K&B is just different, ask anyone. Karatz has recently been trying to buy respectability with donations, but it hasn't done much to improve his reputation.