Pulte Homes Inc. Q4 2008 Earnings Call Transcript

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2009-02-05 13:09:40.0

Tags: Amenity, Pulte Homes Inc., Barclays Plc., Call Transcript, Quarter, Earnings, Sales Strategy, Sales Force Management, Sales, Seeking Alpha

Question-and-Answer Session

Operator

Thank you. (Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Megan McGrath – Barclays.

Megan McGrath – Barclays

I wanted to ask a little bit more about your Del Webb communities and Del in general in this environment. I'm curious if you've tried to redesign any of these communities, lower the age, anything to get sort of more folks in the door and sort of how that's been going for you?

Steven C. Petruska

We've done just about everything imaginable that we can do in those communities. What you've to remember is that most of those communities from a design standpoint have been approved and we have explained to the homeowners just, you know, in fact what amenities they'll be getting.

We do have some leverage typically in overall lot count so what we've been doing, just like we've done in a lot of our communities is we've been increasing our lot count closer to the maximum that's allowed under our zoning. That means probably more smaller lots versus larger lots. We've certainly been looking at the size and scope of amenities and putting in smaller amenities first versus maybe some of the larger stuff. And then clearly we've been looking at different product opportunities. As I said, we've been downsizing our product across the lines, so we've offered more smaller home opportunities for our consumers out there to get our average sales price down.

Megan McGrath - Barclays

And just wondering if you can give any more color - you talked a little bit about prices coming down throughout the quarter. We'd heard from some other builders that actually sequentially throughout 4Q things maybe looked a little better, with October being the worst quarter. Could you give us any more color on what you saw sequentially throughout 4Q?

Richard Dugas, Jr.

It was pretty difficult through the quarter. I think maybe the more telling comment is that it's been better since the beginning of the year, but it was pretty tough through the quarter. We had a sales event in October that I think might have modified our results a little bit through the quarter vis-à-vis what some of the other builders have reported, so I don't know that necessarily we would say things got better through the quarter probably based on that event. I do think economic conditions were the worst in October, candidly, based on what we saw in the stock market and what have you.

 

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