What is this all about?Barratt - the UK house builder - is in free fall. The most recent price quote had them at 91.5 - down 24 percent on the close yesterday. A year ago, the company was trading at 1040. Today, Barratts is worth less than a tenth of what it was worth a year ago.
The BTL brigade might still have faith in the housing bubble, but Barratt investors started to run for the exit a year ago.
5 comments:
Waiting for another rights issue
Funny how the North East is doing now. Every year the local paper does a feature on the region's biggest employers. I forget the details exactly, but it's basically always the same:
1) Public sector
2) Barratt
3) Sage
This tumble does not bode well for the region, nor does an incoming Tory government and a destitute Treasury. What does that mean for all those 2-bed luxury apartments over the river?
Nick
Barratt are not alone... all the builders have taken a pounding.
Redrow, Bellway, Bovis, Taylor Wimpey...
Even suppliers, for example, Travis Perkins, are in near free-fall.
Glad to see you're ahead of my comment below about looking at builders... ;)
It would be great to know how many homes Barratt owns; what is their outstanding debt - and who finances it.
How would a Barratt bankruptcy affect the market?
Here's something I think is interesting about Barratt... their Chairman:
-- From: http://www.barrattdevelopments.co.uk/ir/management/board.aspx --
Charles Toner, Chairman (Age 66). Charles was appointed a Non-Executive Director in May 2002. He was previously Deputy Group Chief Executive of Abbey National plc and is currently a Non-Executive Director of Ford Credit Europe (FCE) Bank plc. He was appointed Group Vice-Chairman in June 2002 and Group Chairman in October 2002.
--
So, the top man at Barratt has previous ties to mortgage lending and currently has another position within financial services. It all seems very incestuous.
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