Yes, the home builders saw a jump, HOV having the best day of the bunch but don’t think that trend will last more than a week or two. If you look at how they are doing on the year, it’s hard to be bullish, it’s 52 week range is 9.76 – 38.66, so to jump 3.22 to 14.55, let’s hold off on licking each other’s popsicles for a minute. It spent last year in the 40’s and 50’s, the first three months of the year in the 30’s, second three months in the 20’s and only the last two months was it in the teens. To pull the, “see you guys are wrong” card because it goes from completely crappy to just crappy, isn’t a vey good argument. Would i short the builders? No. They are already beat down so bad that there isn’t enough room to the downside left and too many people will think it is a bargain getting them for 25 cents on the dollar. Over the last two years it has been falling 10-15 every six months, which is equal to it’s current value. I suspect the majority of the builders will slash prices over the next year 10-30% to move inventory and make the investors happy. The real question is what will that do to the rest of the R/E market. HOV sold 2100 homes by cutting 50-150k per home, what will be effect of every other house in those areas losing a similar amount of appraised value, and for every house they sold, a resale didn’t sell. HOV deserved the stock pop for being the first and if they stay ahead of the pack they will make more in stock value than in building homes, since none of them are making money the race is on to see who can lose the least.
