KB Home sees greater confidence

US house builder KB Home saw its net loss for the six months to 31 May, 2012, narrow to US$ 70 million, compared to US$ 183 million for the first half of last year. Revenues were also up US$ 89 million year-on-year to US$ 557 million for the first half.

At 31 May, KB Homes had a backlog of 2962 homes, representing potential revenues of US$ 693 million. By comparison, the backlog at May 31, 2011 totalled 2422 homes, representing revenues of US$ 502 million.

The house builder reported that, since the beginning of 2012, customers had shown greater confidence in purchasing homes and had been increasingly selecting larger homes.

"We believe these positive trends in our business demonstrate that our strategic product and community repositioning in stronger, highly desirable, land-constrained submarkets is working and has put us on a course to achieve our primary strategic goal of achieving and maintaining profitability at the scale of prevailing market conditions," the company said.

However, it warned that the significant headwinds that the US homebuilding industry has confronted during the prolonged housing downturn were likely to abate slowly, if at all, over the next several quarters. It said this would moderate the pace of recovery and of improvement in its financial and operational results.

"Moreover, recent volatility and uncertainty in economic and employment conditions suggests that it will take some time before we see a return to a more historically typical operating environment in most housing markets," the contractor added.