| Street |
Merger and acquisition activities and a surge in home sales lifted Wall Street for our session ending May 31. The Dow industrials continued their climb higher, and the slow-stepping S&P 500 Index hit its first record close in seven years as our session came to an end, bolstered by the Fed minutes that showed the Fed's nod to the housing slump as a potential to lower interest rates.
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| Sell |
Differentiating in terms of your customer's experience is the easiest, quickest, most effective and budget-friendly way to make more sales. All you have to do is think a little differently than you do right now. But there's a twist.
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| M and A |
Questions abound in regard to resuming home builder merger/acquisition activity. When, what markets and who will lead the next wave of acquisition activity is just a sampling of what's on the industry's mind.
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| Market |
Entry-level home ownership has died down after record highs in 2005. Home builders, hungry to eat up inventory, are turning to a more stable buyer demographic: move-up buyers.
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| Moves |
Steve Wall’s acquisition of Technical Olympic USA’s Newmark Homes division in Dallas, along with John Laing Homes’ sharing a senior executive with its Dubai-based parent Emaar’s operation in India, highlight the movement of people and money in the housing industry this month.
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| Process |
Process mapping is a continuous quality improvement approach that can help home builders reduce operational waste and improve product or service quality, customer satisfaction ratings, team productivity and risk management.
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| From the Editor |
If you are an astute reader who dove into the features before visiting this column, you may have already spotted the divergent views on the current condition of U.S. housing markets in our coverage of the Top 25 builder rankings. If not, let me point out this debate so it will gnaw on you the way it does on me.
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| Feature |
Leadership. Innovation. Proven performance. And community involvement. Those are the attributes the editors of Housing Giants looked for when we decided to name our first-ever CEO of the Year. Webb excelled in all those characteristics under circumstances that had a kind of brunt brutality about them — a forcefulness of hard choices.
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