Inman News Service, a real estate news blog, has a link to a story in the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin that reports that the building giant KB Home is laying off 25 of its 275 employees at the company’s Inland Valley Office in Pomona.
“It’s a normal part of the business cycle,” the Daily Bulletin quotes KB Home spokesman Ray Gomez as saying. “The past few years have been red hot in the Inland Valley in terms of new home construction. The market is normalizing now, and the staffing levels have been adjusted.”
On Wednesday, we ran a piece that examined the slowing pace of home building in San Diego. Several of the big players in the county told me they’re scaling back on new home production until they know what’s going to happen to the housing market. I haven’t yet heard anything about job losses at the large builders in town, however.
“Ultimately, it’s the market that will determine how many houses we’ll build out there,” Gomez is quoted in the Daily Bulletin piece as saying. “But as we go into 2006, the backlog is very big, and that’s a good indicator the market continues to be strong.”
Gomez may say the market’s looking strong, but the Bulletin gives some background to the recent job losses.
“Several (building) companies’ stocks dipped earlier this week when brokerage firms downgraded their ratings for the industry,” reads the article. “Wachovia Securities predicted a ‘substantially more negative’ demand for new homes in a recent report that downgraded KB Home and other home builders.”
Nevertheless, the Bulletin reporter does say that the market in the Inland Valley remains strong, citing information from DataQuick Information systems, a real estate information service, that show prices remaining strong in the area.