Friday, May 05, 2006

What About the Metropolitan Opera Broadcasts?

by Tom Bozzo

McMansion "Luxury home" builder (*) Toll Brothers has been kindly bringing me the Saturday Metropolitan Opera broadcasts since Chevron Corp. decided that it had better things to do with the $7 million or so the old Texaco sponsorship reportedly cost.

I hope the Met either (a) is getting the money directly from the Toll brothers themselves, and not the company, and/or (b) got the money upfront. Because here's another "all ahead full" signal:
AP: Toll Brothers Says Contracts Fall in 2Q.

For the three months ended April 30, Toll projected preliminary contracts of roughly $1.56 billion, down from $2.2 billion in the year-ago period...

The company attributed the drop in contracts and deliveries to a greater supply of homes resulting from a drop in speculative buyers, and more cancellations from non-speculative buyers...

"Speculative buyers are no longer fueling demand; instead they're putting the homes they've recently acquired back on the market or are canceling contracts in mid-construction," Chief Executive Robert Toll said. Much of the excess homes for sale are being aggressively discounted, he added. [Emphasis added.]

The fire-sale stage might make a few headline statistics look OK long enough to give the markets their latest shot of happy gas (oil is up, hooray for Big Oil!; oil is down, hooray for everyone else!), but it's hard to see this making for happy economic news in the election season.

Comments:
Now, now. "Luxury home builder" is trademarked, per the Met site.

And in other news, this dovetails nicely into my (fortunately pending) anti-baselining rant.
 
I think the trademark is "America's luxury home builder." I doubt an attempt to trademark just the last three words would hold up in court.
 
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