HousingPANIC Quote of the Day

"What we have to overcome is the feeling among consumers that to buy a house today is to catch a falling knife"

- Bob Toll of Toll Brothers Homes, (still awaiting indictment for illegal insider trading), February 2008

Daddy Dearist - Housing Crash Version: Bob Toll's daughter walks away from her Toll Brothers McCondo debt-trap

Well, I guess she saw her choices as

1) Go through with the purchase and lose hundreds of thousands (but damn, after Bob Toll cashed in for hundreds of millions by insider-trading his stock you'd have figured she'd have the coin to blow)

2) Ask daddy for more discounts and incentives like he desperately tries to give everyone else

3) Just cut and run, far and fast, and never look back, like most Toll Brothers "buyers" have been doing for months

She wisely chose option #3 - get out and get out now.

Here's Diana Olick, the love of my life, reporting the story on her CNBC blog (ok, Erin Burnett is tops with me, but damn, Diana is doing an awesome job covering this crash unlike most of the dolts on TV)

Florida Taking Its Toll (Brothers) On Daughter's Condo

You just can’t make this stuff up. Apparently even a big builder’s daughter can’t seem to keep faith in the Florida housing market. According to an SEC filing, Wendy Topkis, daughter of Toll Brothers co-founder and Vice-Chairman Bruce Toll, is walking away from a Florida condo, just like everyone else. A Toll Bros. condo!! The Palm Beach Post says it best: Et Tu Wendy?

According to the home builder’s proxy statement:

Prior to fiscal 2007, the Company entered into an agreement of sale to build and sell a condominium to Wendy Topkis, Bruce E. Toll’s daughter, and her husband for a purchase price of $2,468,075. In January 2008, the buyers informed the Company that they did not intend to make settlement on the condominium. The Company intends to pursue its rights under the agreement of sale.

Does that mean they’ll sue darling daughter? The company’s general counsel says they are pursuing normal procedures.

"Dancing on the bottom" insider-trader Bob Toll has a hernia and announces (more) horrific results

It sure was fun to see Bob and Bruce Toll dump so many shares the last two years. They knew what was coming, even as they were calling bottoms and talking up their stock. And now it's come.

I'm not sure who'll be the first to see jail time for false statements, falsified financial documents (auditors anyone?) or insider trading - Bob Toll or Angelo Mozilo. But as always, it'll be fun to watch.

Toll Brothers Reports $81.8M 4Q Loss in Housing Downturn; Calls 2007 Worst Year in 4 Decades

"By many measures, Fiscal 2007 was the most challenging of the forty years that Toll Brothers has been in business," Robert Toll, chairman and chief executive officer, said in a statement. "1974 was perhaps rougher, but the difficult times only lasted one year."

And remember this quote, from a year ago, as he was still dumping shares and before the massive write-downs everyone (except his auditors) knew would come:

"Fifteen months into the current slowdown, we may be seeing a floor in some markets where deposits and traffic, although erratic from week to week, seem to be dancing on the bottom or slightly above," said Toll in a statement accompanying the earnings report

Nice to see BusinessWeek cover the housing crash - AFTER it happened

Maybe Time or Newsweek will put the biggest story in the world on their cover soon? Maybe?

Bonfire Of The Builders - By rushing into the mortgage business big-time, homebuilders helped fuel the housing crisis

A diverse cast of characters combined to launch the once-in-a-lifetime housing boom of the past five years. Traditional mortgage companies and banks unleashed a barrage of loans, many to borrowers with iffy credit histories who didn't bother to read the fine print about upwardly mobile interest rates. Wall Street egged on the often-reckless underwriting by buying vast quantities of home loans for repackaging as securities. Now that the boom has fizzled and foreclosure rates are rising, the important role of large homebuilders as lenders is also coming into sharper focus.