Housing and the jobs economy: Phoenix points the way [The Real Estate Economy]

I don’t have a Phoenix fetish, honest — I write about the place because I see the metro as the capital of the home-building industry. Here I’m betting that it was a major contributor to the job losses I posted about on Monday, and that what came out in last Friday’s Bureau of Labor Statistic report is going to snowball.
When I say that Phoenix is ‘Housing Central’ I don’t mean it in the same sense that Hollywood is the capital of the movie industry because the six major studios are based there, or in the way that Manhattan is a capital of finance because the big banks and brokerages are headquartered there. The head offices of the  major U.S. home-builders are literally all over the map — Pulte/Del Webb (PHM) is outside of Detroit, Continental/Deitz-Crane (DHI) is in Fort Worth, TX.

Stubborn sellers in Phoenix

But Phoenix is the industry’s number one […]

Original post by noemail@noemail.org (noemail@noemail.org (Paul Kaihla) and software by Elliott Back