KB Home (KBH) is set to report its first quarter results after the market close on Wednesday, March 20th. The report comes after the Census Bureau released new data that shows housing starts rebounded in February, rising 10.7% from January to seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.52 million.
Yahoo Finance's Dani Romero takes a closer look at what Wall Street is expecting from KB Home's report.
For more expert insight and the latest market action, click here to watch this full episode of Yahoo Finance Live.
Editor's note: This article was written by Stephanie Mikulich.
Video Transcript
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ALEXANDRA CANAL: A spotlight on housing today as fresh data showed a rebound in housing starts for the month of February. This coming ahead of first quarter results from KB Home reporting after the market closed on Wednesday. Here with more on what to expect is Yahoo Finance's Dani Romero. So Dani, what are you watching for tomorrow's report?
DANI ROMERO: Wall Street is expecting that this quarter be a lot softer than the last quarter. There really one of the areas is the homes delivered. They're expecting that area to really be lower. They're expecting that to land around 3,000 homes delivered for this first quarter of this year. And if we compare that to the fourth quarter last year, homes delivered were dropped-- dropped about 10% to around 3,400 homes.
Meanwhile, analysts are really expecting net orders to climb near to over 3,000. And that's well over last quarter's results. So that really does show that their home builders are enticing. They're expecting that-- excuse me-- that to continue to offer those juicy incentives, which they have been to entice buyers back into the market. Some of those incentives have been the mortgage rate buydowns, which means that the builder upfronts the cost to lower the rate on the loan.
Bottom line, the new home market is still outperforming the existing home market. And we just got fresh data out today that really does show that housing starts for both single family and multifamily jumped nearly 11% last month. So that really was the strongest gain since last month-- since last year, really driven by the single family starts. So really, another sign of such a positive outlook for the new home market at the end of the day.
JOSH LIPTON: What distinguishes KB Home, Dani-- we were talking about this-- like, between like in the new home market, what's their focus as opposed to Toll or DR Horton?
DANI ROMERO: Yeah. They are focused on build-to-order aspect, and they're really trying to capture the first-time home buyer, which is why those incentives keep enticing buyers into the market because they're really trying to capture that demographic, at the end of the day, who are dealing with the affordability issue.
JOSH LIPTON: Yeah, for sure. Dani, thanks so much. We'll be watching.
