Thought some of you might appreciate this article (from the NY Times Sunday Mag.) about Toll Brothers and the rise of the mega-builder.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/magazine/16brothers.html
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Quick quotes:
“At the moment, Toll controls enough land for nearly 80,000 houses. Its competitors, which tend to build lower-priced houses on smaller lots, have even larger accumulations. K. Hovnanian has land for more than 100,000 houses. Pulte Homes holds 350,000 sites.”
and
“Toll agreed that the mortgage industry needed to tighten up its lending practices and stop pushing interest-only loans to high-risk clients. In midsummer, he predicted that some metropolitan areas – “New York and Washington and Phoenix and San Fran and L.A. and Las Vegas and Naples and Boca” – were about to slow down painfully. “Investors will get creamed, and they’ll get out of the deals,” he said, noting that a subsequent recovery would take anywhere from 3 to 10 months. But beyond that – a catastrophic crash? “Why can’t real estate just have a boom like every other industry?” Toll asked in complaint. “Why do we have to have a bubble and then a pop?””