Luxury Leading Way in Housing Rebound: Toll CEO
Special to CNBC.com
The housing market is showing "signs of improvement" with help from luxury home sales, Toll Brothers Chief Executive Douglas Yearley told CNBC Thursday.
"There are some signs luxury is leading us out of this a little bit," he said. "We're clearly off the bottom."
But while Toll is a builder of those luxury homes, the CEO expects sales the rest of the year to be relatively flat. That's despite 60 percent of Toll sales coming from the northeast corridor of Boston to Washington, D.C., which was not hit with the same housing problems as Las Vegas and Florida, among others.
"I think in pockets we’ll see some success," Yearley said. "The good news is pricing has definitely stabilized. We’re not seeing price reductions. In some isolated cases, we have some pricing power, we’re able to raise prices."
He added that after five or six years of waiting, buyers want "to move on with their lives and I think they’re done trying to time the perfect point to get in the market. They’re taking advantage of great interest rates. Affordability’s at an all-time high…It’s helping us but we have a long ways to go."