Net income for the three months ended April 30 was $89.1 million, or 51 cents a share, compared with $67.9 million, or 37 cents, a year earlier, the Horsham, Pennsylvania-based builder said in a statement Tuesday. The average estimate of 15 analysts was for earnings of 46 cents a share, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
The stock market has rebounded from a slide early in the year, helping to prop up demand for high-end real estate nationwide. Toll Brothers, the only large publicly traded builder focused on luxury homes, has expanded in some of the country’s priciest areas, such as California and New York City.
Concern about Toll’s presence in the New York market, where high-end sales have cooled amid a surge in supply and a pullback by foreign buyers “is overdone – it’s less than 10 percent of their revenue and California is still strong,” Megan McGrath, an analyst with MKM Holdings LLC in Stamford, Connecticut, said in a phone interview Monday. “In a growth environment, if you assume they can continue to grow, it’s pretty compelling.”
The company delivered 1,304 homes in the quarter, a 9 percent increase by volume from a year earlier. The average selling price climbed to $855,500 from $713,500. Sales slipped in California but the market remains strong, the firm said.
The gross margin, excluding interest and write downs, climbed to 25.7 percent from 25.3 percent a year earlier.
Toll has fallen 28 percent in the 12 months through Monday, the worst performance in an S&P index of homebuilders, which has slipped 6 percent…
Company’s full report;
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/toll-brothers-reports-fy-2016-…
Aside from that last week someone on “the box” claimed that there was a shortage of entry level homes in the U.S. I had just caught the end of the conversation and don’t have any other details about that.
JT