Home Builders List

Last week we talked about Richmond American building many new homes in northeast Virginia, even though the Virginia housing market doesn’t seem to be all that great. It seems that they’re not the only ones who see great things coming in 2011.

It seems that there are predictions coming from entities such as the National Association of Home Builders, Barclays, and Moody’s Analytics Inc of new home sales increasing by 10% to 15% over last year. National home builders such as Toll Brothers and Lennar aren’t sitting by waiting for all housing markets to go back to peak conditions of 2006 either. Because of their size they’ve been able to hold out longer than smaller home builders and are getting financing and starting to build home communities throughout the country.

Their stock prices are continuing to rise as well. As bad as housing was throughout 2008 and 2009, a turnaround began at some point in 2010, and the S&P Supercomposite Homebuilding Index shows a 30% growth since Nov. 30. The S&P Index shows a 9.7% in the same period.

Something else that’s happened is that the large home builders have been able to step in and buy up properties that were owned by smaller home builders and thus were able to build up their portfolios with minimal cost, since they were able to get great deals in states like Nevada and Florida, where housing really took a tumble, and continues to suffer in large parts.

A growing home building season would solve a lot of woes for the housing industry, and as long as the big boys are building, it means there will be plenty of choices for potential homebuyers.

Is the Virginia housing market getting better? Maybe not according to many indicators, but if Richmond American has anything to say about it, things are looking up.

The national home builder has recently requested permits and is getting ready to start building in a few communities within Virginia. One of those communities is in the Spotsylvania County area where they recently applied for permits to build 6 homes.

Another community is in Loudoun County, where they will be building 16 homes that will each have at least 1/3rd of an acre of land. It’s already been announced that these will be luxury homes starting around $540,000, with 6 floor plans for buyers to choose from.

And this isn’t all. They’ve also applied for permits to build homes in Fredricksburg and Stafford Counties as well. All of these areas are in the northeastern part of the state, close enough to Washington D.C. to make them very attractive for commuters.

Richmond American may be hedging their bet on a recovery in this area, and it seems investors are following along with them, as Deutsche Bank, which recently lowered their price target for shares of the main holding company for their company, has listed them as a stock worthy of a “buy” rating. That’s good news no matter how you look at it.