Warren Buffet, the billionaire entrepreneur become very famous for his foresight, recently sent his annual letter to his shareholders. This year he has a special section dedicated to real estate where is is directly involved because Berkshire Hataway Inc, his company, owns the house manufacturing company Clayton Homes.
According do Buffet’s analysis, the manufactured homes market is in very serious trouble because the economy is still slow and because of the number of new houses that started production in 2009 (housing starts) is the lowest in 50 years in the US. The overall figure being: 554,000 compared to the 2 million annual production that was going on a few years ago.
New house starts (new construction beginning) is at the lowest in 50 years.
It is a dramatically strong reduction that has serious impact on employment (it is actually pretty easy to find tradesman and construction people available for work today) but that is helping the recovery of the general real estate market.
Indeed, with so little new homes being constructed or manufactured, the inventory on the market has a chance of being unloaded faster. Actually January has been a very slow month after the rush of the buyers who wanted to take advantage of the tax credit that was supposed to end in December 2009, but Buffet sees the dramatic drop in new houses as a very good indicator for the overall real estate market and he estimates that within a year “the residential housing problem” should largely be behind us.
Looking at the figures, 650 thousand net housing units were added during 2009 and during there were not as many new households: about 650 thousand, therefore just enough to balance the houses that had been added but not enough to seriously reduce the inventory, which should instead start reducing for real in 2010. How fast? It depends on what the banks do with their foreclosure backlog and how people will take advantage of the tax credit and of the government support to new first time home buyers.
Roberto Mazzoni
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