So when is the bottom in housing you ask?
Not until 2010, according to C.P. Morgan chief, Tom Eggleston.
Here's the skinny from one of the nation's largest privately held home builders.
From Reuters by Ben Klayman and Ilaina Jonas entitled: No housing bottom until '10:CP Morgan.
"The chief executive of one of the largest privately owned U.S. home builders said on Thursday he doesn't see the struggling U.S. housing market's weak demand hitting a bottom until the middle of 2010.
"We believe there is another 2-1/2 years of the cycle that still has to play out, until it goes up," Tom Eggleston, head of C.P. Morgan Communities, said at the Reuters Housing Summit in New York.
"We think the bottom will be a prolonged period, and that the recovery would not be a sharp 'V,' but will be a soft recovery," he added.
Eggleston also expects one-half of the National Association of Home Builders' 75,000 members to be in financial distress within three years. (Emphasis mine)
"I think survival is a question," he said, adding that many more builders are too small to be members of the trade group.
C.P. Morgan, one of the top 30 largest U.S. home builders as rated by closings according to Builder magazine, saw revenue fall 20 percent to $406 million last year. Eggleston expects it to decline again in 2008. The company sold almost 2,700 homes last year.
"The American dream to buy your first house, to build equity and then trade up ... has been disrupted by recent events, and it has discouraged the first-time buyer," Eggleston said. First-time buyers account for about 80 percent of C.P. Morgan's sales.
He also sees U.S. home prices falling another 20 percent, while land prices fall 25 percent."
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