How Companies Are Riding Out The Housing Slowdown

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Focusing so closely on the real estate side of housing, we sometimes forget all of the other industries that have tied their fortunes to the housing boom. When a new home is built, there is the demand for appliances, furniture, fixtures, and hundreds of other items. All of these industries have seen improved results as new home construction boomed, and are feeling the after effects of the slowdown.

MarketWatch has an interesting article on how these companies are coping with the housing slowdown, and why a housing downturn is not as dire as it would have been in the past. The trick is that these companies are not tied solely to the US economy anymore, but are multinationals. As long as the slowdown does not go global, the companies growth is tied to many different countries across the world, not solely the United States.

Though domestic demand for everything from large appliances to construction machinery has waned, customers overseas are still buying plenty of the same kind of goods, a sign that their economies have so far remained fairly insulated from the U.S. housing bust.
That’s getting played up in a season when corporate reports have been all about protecting profits in the face of North America’s real-estate gloom.
U.S.-based stalwarts like Whirlpool, Black & Decker and Caterpillar have sought to blunt the fallout from the real-estate downturn by highlighting for investors the market potential that remains in markets from China to Eastern Europe.  via MarketWatch.