Staff down to about 50 employees
By Dick Hogan
Originally posted on October 30, 2007
First Home Builders in Fort Myers, which two years ago was on top of the world as Lee County’s biggest residential contractor with almost 1,200 employees, is down to about 50 today following its layoff of 200 workers.
The move was done in response to the current sluggish real estate market, said Ray Casas, spokesman for Red Bank, N.J.-based Hovnanian Enterprises, which acquired the assets of First Home in August 2005.
Workers who were laid off will be paid through Dec. 28, although they won’t all work through that date, he said.
“We will see ya all Monday morning for business as the ‘new normal,'” First Home president Fred Hermann told employees in an e-mail Friday afternoon. “If asked by anyone … assure everyone we are not closing our doors … just ‘right sizing.’ Thank you for helping us all get through the day.”
The layoffs come as the low-end home sector, First Home’s specialty, is in dire straits in Lee County with a huge inventory of vacant houses caused by waves of speculation and failed loans to buyers who turned out to be unable to close or make their payments.
There were 1,220 foreclosures filed in the county in September, 915 of them for single-family houses. That’s more than five times the 237 from a year earlier. Meanwhile, the number of building permits issued fell to 121 from 698 in the same time period.
“It’s going to be like going through some quicksand for a couple years” for low-end builders, said Naples-based real estate consultant Michael Timmerman.
The turnaround should come by the first quarter of 2009 as the market absorbs the houses built for buyers who refused to close or lost them in foreclosure, he said.
Mike Larson, a housing industry analyst for Jupiter-based Weiss Research, an investment research firm, said layoffs are occurring around the country but especially in markets such as Lee County, where prices and numbers of houses built rose wildly.
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