Economic signs

your views are warped, i think you mean the middleclass? your high end home market is very small compared to suburban USA, you get your average builder thats use to building 100 homes a year instead of the onsie twosies, are the ones turned the wheel.
here is a question in one years time, if you do 3 floors in a million dollar house or 60 floors in 200k houses, you'll be working everyday, with the 60 floors, putting gas in your truck, going to the Home depot for supply's etc etc......

eric lavine wrote: your views are warped, i think you mean the middleclass? your high end home market is very small compared to suburban USA, you get your average builder thats use to building 100 homes a year instead of the onsie twosies, are the ones turned the wheel. here is a question in one years time, if you do 3 floors in a million dollar house or 60 floors in 200k houses, you'll be working everyday, with the 60 floors, putting gas in your truck, going to the Home depot for supply's etc etc......

Eric, my views are just mine that I wanted to share but they are the reality of my local situation. If reality is warped what are you viewing that is not warped? five years ago my company had 40% more employees and serviced all segments of the housing industry, from new construction and remodeling of homes valued from $100,000 to twelve million. After the housing bubble burst there were brand new homes sitting on the market that still are being liquidated. why have a house built if there are plenty of brand new ones just waiting for you and on sale? I would love to be putting floors in 100 brand new starter homes this year, but they are just not out there to pursue. The mid range housing followed the same trend, there are some being built but not a ton. You are correct that the high end market is smaller, but we had a solid foot in the door in that market, and were getting a good percentage of them from about three different builders, the one I mentioned was the busiest. They were our bread and butter, with a few remodels hear and there to give us some meat and potatoes. Nothing is changing in the other segments. We cannot trade off the mansions for a bunch of smaller homes that are not out there. In the building boom everything together had me firmly in the middle of the middle class. Lately the mansions had me holding onto lower middle class. If the mansions go away I am looking at the prospect of scrapping by as a handyman or an Obama kid. I look for new employment each week in another industry, but there are few bites and I have yet to land anything.

My point was the lower and middle class have not been spending in my industry, now it seems to be hitting hard in the upper class at least in my area. You may not believe trickle down economics works to your satisfaction, but I see its direct effects everyday, or at least I had been. If the rich stop spending it effects us all. I just wanted to give you all a heads up.

Oh, believe me, when oct 08 hit i was scratching my nuts saying WTF, i swear the phone didnt ring for 2 weeks straight, i lost material things, not my sanity, went from 600k gross down to half and leveled from there on out, my overhead was the same...but, it made me smarter stronger and wiser, i would take anything through that door to make a buck..I look back, still got the family, still eat good, still get laid once in a while...fck, im happy

Since Fountain Power Boats went under the factory was sold.
Now ALL the molds and tooling are sitting outside next to one of the buildings.

Sure is sad to see all that equipment out in the elements.
Must be 100s of thousands of dollars (or more) .

Dave - No, I had an eerie feeling about this year even before, I swear the big playas pump up the stock market to suck us little fish in!

No offense to Dave's localized market data... I am sure it does hurt

but every economic indicator that we look at to set our production goals shows exactly the opposite.

Supplier leadtimes are going up because thier orders have increased and we are no longer have the run of thier machines.

Half of our CAD designers have left or put in notice in the last 6 months (painfully 2 really good ones in the last month, so anyone with rotating machine design experience in Unigraphics looking to move to Syracuse give me a call) - we are bracing ourselves to continue to lose anyone who currently has a long commute as opportunities to work closer to home are coming up.

My informal boat show tracking shows that there was increased activity and sales at both the Syracuse and Charlotte shows this year as compared to last.

What really happens of course remains to be seen - despite recent increases in housing indicators we will be recovering from the housing overproduction and crash for some time.

its a sign Dave, that the rich do have and hold the money. i dont know if you can fathom how big the middleclass is compared to the rich, the rich really is a small group but with alot of buying power, how many rich people do you know? its a very delicate balance, the middle gets squeezed during a recession, the poor does not notice it and the rich does not notice it, its the guy in the middle, if gas shot up to 10 bucks a gallon would the rich park their Limo's, probably not, the poor rely on public transportation.
thats why the rich can go plop down 10 million cash on a boat, we bitch about the gas going up a quater and we feel it, it hits our bottom line. the middleclass needs the tax breaks, our income certainly has not followed suit. we the middle need a break

john b wrote: This is a good weathervane. These are the citizens who fuel the economy. It is sooooo good to se the economy coming back strong! Detroit automakers race to keep up with sales. http://uscc.apnews.com/ap/db_45577/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=mfoLuHVR&src=cat&dbid=45577&dbname=Top+News&detailindex=9

rightyganda lol, my new word for the week

Waterdog wrote:    Since Fountain Power Boats went under the factory was sold. Now ALL the molds and tooling are sitting outside next to one of the buildings. Sure is sad to see all that equipment out in the elements. Must be 100s of thousands of dollars (or more) .

Reggie Fountain spent a good amount of time in our booth talking to my boss and I about his future plans. It seemed like being pushed out at Fountain really hurt him personally, but he is ready to be back building boats.

All of the tooling that they had was worth millions as far as what it would cost to retool all those parts.

eric lavine wrote: rightyganda lol, my new word for the week

Counters Democrap!LOL

Cash flow for the company and a cash buyer at a dealer are two very different things.