David Seiders Cooling Quotations

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.

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.

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