San Diego has about the best climate in the nation, which means darn close to 365 days a year of golf weather. And the real estate market there, about as bad as it gets once you discount (no pun intended) Las Vegas, Miami, and Phoenix, seems like the classic buying opportunity for folks who have intended to move there all along (assuming they don't need a sub-prime mortgage to swing it). I have no interest in moving to the Left Coast, but I defend anyone's right to do so, especially at bargain basement auction prices. This could be one of those opportunities, and I was hungry for more details.
Fuhgeddaboutit. I checked the Horton web site and found no mention of any auction. I tried a web search with the terms "Horton," "San Diego," "real estate" and "auction." Nothing...except a blog article by Diana Olick of CNBC online describing how, she too, had searched largely in vain for some info about the auction. She cross referenced an auction house's online listings for this Saturday in San Diego with the names of Horton's communities there and discovered that 53 units in two of the communities were under the gavel this weekend. Nowhere on the site for the Real Estate Disposition Corporation is there mention that these are Horton homes. I wouldn't be surprised if REDC is a wholly owned subsidiary of Horton (although there may be rules against that).
Publicly traded companies like Horton owe the investment community a bit more transparency than that. Last week, a competitor, Hovnanian, bellied up to the bar and announced deep discounts on more than 2,000 homes. It isn't as if the rest of us are in the dark about how bad the housing market is at the moment.
But these must be demoralizing times inside building companies. Maybe Horton has had to lay off the copywriter in the investor relations department who usually posts news about the company on their web site. (The writers are always the first to go!) Better they should lay off the schizophrenic employee with the naming rights to the Horton communities. The two being auctioned off this weekend are the appropriately named Esperanza, which means "hope," and La Boheme. I am not an opera fan, but I understand the Puccini opera is about struggle and poverty, and it ends miserably. Let's hope the weekend is more esperanza and less boheme for Horton.
You can read Ms. Olick's article here, and find the auction site here.