The St. Joe Company yesterday put a gun in its mouth and shot itself in the foot. The Jacksonville-based company announced it has put 100,000 Florida acres up for sale, will lay off 75% of its workforce and will scrap the dividend it pays shareowners. In addition, St. Joe announced it was getting out of the construction business and will concentrate on developing planned communities.
The company certainly could have "planned" a lot better over recent years as hurricanes, clogged roads, unnaturally high real estate prices and increasing property taxes started reversing the migration trends in and out of the state. It isn't as if this was a surprise to anyone with a Florida newspaper subscription. Maybe if the planners at St. Joe had been doing their jobs, the drastic measures of yesterday's announcements could have been phased in over time.
In any event, the strategic planners and public relations staff ought to be first in the purge for letting their chief executive sound like a nincompoop. During a conference call yesterday, St. Joe CEO Peter Rummell talked out of multiple sides of his mouth.
"This is not a fire sale," he said of the dumping of 100,000 acres, 190 homes and 1,200 developed home sites, not to mention the elimination of 760 jobs. "We are not dumping stuff on the market, and we are not going to make stupid decisions, but there are things that we believe have reached their height in pricing." Like, perhaps, St. Joe's stock price?
The St. Joe press release that preceded Mr. Rummell's obfuscation is insulting to anyone who understands the basics of business and how to read plain English.
"St. Joe intends to harvest value from its land assets that are no longer strategic," the release states, "that have already been moved to their highest and best uses, or whose full potential value is beyond the time-value curve."
Even the National Association of Realtors has stopped denying the realities of the real estate market, but St. Joe is still in a Sunshine State of denial.
"I firmly believe," CEO Rummell added, trying to convince us that he firmly believes anything that smacks of forthrightness, "that we would be doing this whether the market was good or bad."
Yeah, right.
In an attempt to prolong his golfing career, Jack Nicklaus has re-invented himself as a lefty. We received an anonymous phone message indicating the Golden Bear's secret conversion and referring us to the Bear Mountain web site in Canada. We have caller ID and wanted more information. When we returned the call, the party on the other end announced "Mickelson residence" and then hung up when we indicated why we were calling. 
