David Seiders Quotations

When you start to see cancellations, you really get worried.

We've been in a period when a lot of equity has been dropped in our laps, and it has been fairly easy to get to that equity in tax favorable ways. In these circumstances, savings will fall given the strong consumer attitude in America.

Now what happens to the market depends on the interest rate structure. Long rates have been better than expected, but I think we can see them rising, moving into alignment with what's going on with the economy and with short-term rates.

We're now in the 'middle innings' of the current economic expansion, and the next economic recession is not yet in sight.

It is a time-tested pattern. February has essentially returned to normal conditions, suggesting to me that we will see a substantial decline in housing starts.

Our forecasts show 6 percent to 7 percent declines in home sales and single-family housing starts in 2006, followed by smaller declines in 2007.

My overall assessment of the housing sector is that we probably fundamentally topped out in the third quarter of 2005 in terms of home sales and housing production.

I was obviously delighted to see this rebound. I think what it tells us is that the housing market is still fundamentally strong.

Winter weather really takes the sting out of these declines.

We're certainly seeing a record rate of return in real terms (after factoring out inflation), and there has been very little sign of deceleration. But it is probably inevitable that some of this will slow down.

We had unusually bad weather in many parts of the country in December, and the conditions in January were extraordinarily warm.

We can't hold at the pace we had last year. It's not going to be the end of the world -- it's going to be a simmering down to a very healthy pace.

While new-home sales have been quite strong throughout 2005, we see a cooling of the market to a healthy and more sustainable pace in the months ahead, as substantiated by recent surveys of our builders. For 2006, we expect to see a 6 percent to 7 percent drop in sales, but certainly no reason for alarm. This would make 2006 the second or third best year in housing history.

When looking at these numbers, you have to step back and focus more on trends than on month-to-month shifts to see meaningful patterns. This government report traditionally has lots of month-to-month volatility and is subject to substantial revision.

The recent stabilization is consistent with the orderly cooling-down process that NAHB has been forecasting.

We see a flattening of housing starts and the beginning of a cooling process.

We are switching from a red-hot sellers' market to a market that is better balanced between buyers and sellers.

As they generally have done throughout 2005, builders have maintained a healthy balance between supply and demand.

There's other housing numbers showing some declines in April as well. My own survey of builders has shown them losing some momentum for the last couple of months, including May. I think there's some evidence accumulating that this supposedly highly interest-sensitive part of the economy is starting to give ground.

I've been expecting the housing-production component of GDP to move from a strong growth engine to a neutral or negative element in the U.S. economy over the next year and a half.

Some softening of long-term interest rates since early December helped buoy builder attitudes. Consumer confidence has rebounded nicely from post-Katrina lows.

The big risk is: How many investor-owned units are there? How many hidden units will come back into the market?

The weather basically gave the builders an opportunity to move things forward. No one changed their plans. But I'll probably change my forecasts for the next two months lower, even if I keep the first quarter forecast at pretty much the same level.

This has been an incredibly resilient U.S. economy, and housing has been a significant piece of that. The hurricanes provided a very significant risk, but we have seemed to have come through that. Despite the risks that might be present in the near future, I'll throw my cards into this economy simply because of how it's performed.

There is now accumulating evidence that the housing market peaked somewhere in the third quarter. Our survey of builder confidence, which came out yesterday, was down a lot. . . . It was the biggest drop since the first survey after 9/11.

It was impossible to maintain double-digit price inflation like we've seen the past few years.

It's healthy. We do need to have that happen -- gracefully, though. Affordability problems are glaring in the hottest areas. We've reached the point where something's really got to give.

It's been an unprecedented run for the housing sector.

The numbers continue to look great. We're riding at an incredibly high level here.

The big builders are marking down their outlooks for 2006 and rolling out some sales incentives -- the sort of things we see when the market starts to weaken on the demand side.

It's when people view these changes as enduring that it really can affect their current spending behavior. I think that is happening probably, and I'm hoping that house price appreciation, the equity accumulation, will help soften the blow in consumer spending.

I view the housing-starts and permit numbers for January as a temporary burst.

The warmest winter weather on record is what is driving a lot of this. I think that is the key factor behind this very strong surge in housing market activity, and as we move forward I think we're going to see these numbers come back down a lot.

The retreat in housing-market activity that's now under way amounts to a simmering-down process from unsustainable market conditions in 2005, rather than a classic cyclical contraction that could spiral down for some time.

This is definitely a good sign that the housing market is stabilizing.

It's really unprecedented, so you wonder if it can continue.

I'm calling 2006 a simmering-down process. It's been one heck of a run.

I am worried about the potential for a trailing down process that gains some momentum.

I basically have a wait-and-see attitude with some healthy suspicion about this report. Either there is something that all of those other reports are not telling us, or this will get revised.

I do have this sort of weakening of the housing sector, but I think it should be thought of as a systematic cooling down process toward sustainable levels of activity and not viewed as kind of a classic housing downswing that's part of an economic cycle leading to a recession.

The key reason the market is losing momentum is a major decline in housing affordability measures as prices continue to move up aggressively in many, many markets around the country. There are reasons for the builders to be doing things to bolster demand, hold buyers in and limit cancellations, and I think that's what's going on out there.

The housing market is seeking out a peak. While it is still too early to conclude that it has found one, there is growing evidence that the Fed has started to hit its mark and housing will begin losing some of its exuberance in the period ahead.

The home-ownership rate has edged down a bit from its high in early 2004, and we're seeing more people moving into rental housing.

The hurricanes did cause some dramatic problems short-term, and there are some lingering ones.

All the fundamentals remain in place, and the overall housing market continues to exhibit ongoing strength. Favorable mortgage rates, as well as strong household income and job growth, continue to bolster housing demand.