Bruce Gross: We have not given an actual number out but we do expect it will be significantly less and it will be matching what we are seeing in the market and taking down home sites as needed for our business. It is somewhat dependent on market conditions but it will be significantly below where we were last year.
Stephen East (Pali Research): What do you think you spent on JV’s for the quarter from a cash perspective?
Bruce Gross: We did have re-margining payments of approximately $24 million during the quarter and we had land purchases from JV’s that were somewhere over $100 million and a few joint venture consolidations which was not actually a spend, it would just show up on the books. Somewhere between $100 and $200 million relating to land purchases, re-margining payments would be the number. When we put out our cash flow statement we will see final numbers relative to joint venture contributions as well.
Ken Zener (Merrill Lynch): Your cash went down over $400 million. Where else did the cash go?
Bruce Gross: You are taking the $600 million of cash we had at year end and add in the $850 and we ended up at about $1.1 billion. Our land purchase during the quarter, which includes what we purchased from the joint ventures, was approximately $350 million during the quarter. That would be the lion’s share. That is down considerably from the first quarter of last year and that is where the bulk of that would be and it was more heavily loaded in the first quarter as we have seen in past years putting in place the home sites that we are looking at for where we need them for the current year.
Ken Zener (Merrill Lynch): Your units under construction sequentially went down but your completed unsold went up modestly. Can you talk about the desire to put new vertical?
Stuart Miller: Our appetite for putting inventory in the ground is still low. We have in all instances adjusted our starts carefully in each market to our sales pace. We do not want to kid ourselves and say each home that we put under construction gets sold in advance because we recognize the cancellation rate can easily frustrate what one thinks in the sold homes under construction and make it an unsold home. Our desire to build inventory or to start new homes is carefully matched to what we think the market demand is at the current moment.
Ken Zener (Merrill Lynch): The FHA provides a lot of liquidity for the industry in general but it does not seem to address the structural issue. Meaning, giving people liquidity, i.e. 3% down, but in the deflationary environment they are going to be under water soon. They can get a house but then they can be unmotivated to keep the house given their slow down payment. Can you address that conflict?
Stuart Miller: In today’s current market the lion’s share of the downward pressure, especially for new homes, is behind us. The U.S. housing market has always been dependent on a sizeable part of our market looking for the lion’s share of its purchase price coming from the debt market. We have had a housing market that has supported itself well through the years by being a highly levered market with high loan to value ratios. The sub-prime market was a market that got away from us. Underwriting did not start with underwriting the ability of the customer to repay. I think in a market today where adequate underwriting controls are in place to make sure that we are financing homes to people who can afford to actually repay the mortgage and who are invested in the home – even though the investment might be relatively small, ensures you have a market that starts to stabilize and in a stabilized market you end up with homes or loans that do get repaid and a housing market that is in good condition.
Michael Rehaut (JP Morgan): How much of the land you are deferring in terms of putting it aside for construction in 2009 or 2010 increased?
Stuart Miller: It is not just the home sites that we are preparing to build on; it is each and every asset that is in the portfolio.
Diane Barrette: The reviews that we have gone through we start with the assets that we are going to build homes on, then we go to the assets that we are looking to sell in the short term, but then we also mentioned that we look at the assets that currently there is no plan to sell. It is each and every asset and there is just some confusion in the way we broke that discussion up. There is no limitation as to what we look at. We have not spent a lot of time deciding which assets were fuller; in fact it is probably the opposite direction in that we have been aggressive of looking at everything. Even the assets that perhaps do go out into the future more than some of the current assets we are expelling. We have been clear that we look at every single asset regardless of whether it is a current asset or longer term asset, including all the assets that exist in our joint ventures, which is where the bulk of the longer term assets would be.
Michael Rehaut (JP Morgan): To the extent there is further negative home price deflation over the next quarter, do you still expect that to have an impact or a result in your impairment analysis?
Stuart Miller: As we sought to go through impairments and come to the end of 2007 it was our decided strategy to try to get ahead of the situation instead of lagging behind it. Even with order trends looking like pricing could continue downward, we are going to see a materially lesser impact because of the heavy lifting that we have already undertaken. I think that as we have looked at assets, as we have gone through our impairment review through time and redacted those numbers, we did that with an eye towards understanding that the market would likely continue to deteriorate and if the market does continue to deteriorate there might be some additional impairment it will be not near the magnitude that we have seen in the past.
Bruce Gross: Our land under development dollars in the first quarter are down to $1.5 billion. There has been a significant decline of what is remaining on the balance sheet on the inventory category.
Michael Rehaut (JP Morgan): Last quarter the JV’s has a set to cap at about 65%. Is that sustainable?
Stuart Miller: That is going to continue to be a moving target and hard to kind of peg. Every joint venture in reality stands on its own. An important question within each joint venture whether it is a recourse, non-recourse, debt facility and what the responsible parties has their respective obligations. It is kind of a generically pegged what a right debt to capital percentage is for joint ventures as a group. It is something that we are not going to be able to peg for you. As I noted in our last quarter conference call, all of our joint ventures were conservatively capitalized at the outset. The market movement downward has rocked that capitalization into the negative in much all instances. The reason they were capitalized conservatively in the beginning was to be able to withstand negative impact and that is what most of them are doing and those that are not they are being renegotiated into that position.
Bruce Gross: As you look at the overall joint venture debt to total capital, if you strip out land source because we did not step up the basis last year when we admitted a new partner in the first quarter of last year, land source has close to 100% debt to total capital as a result of not stepping up the asset, which is included in your numbers. In the current quarter, the debt to total capital excluding land source is about 57%.
Michael Rehaut (JP Morgan): Can you give an idea of the total debt that is out there from the JV’s that you are involved with?
Stuart Miller: We would not talk about specific joint ventures.
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