Homebuilder Stocks Lose Value

New York–The housing slump cut 67 percent from homebuilders’ market value in the New York-based Standard & Poor’s 500 Index, changing the companies into small-cap stocks, Bloomberg reported Tuesday.S&P 500 home developers have an overall market value of $16 billion–a reduction from $49.2 billion in January 2006, which was their peak.The nation’s largest builder by…

New York–The housing slump cut 67 percent from homebuilders’ market value in the New York-based Standard & Poor’s 500 Index, changing the companies into small-cap stocks, Bloomberg reported Tuesday.S&P 500 home developers have an overall market value of $16 billion–a reduction from $49.2 billion in January 2006, which was their peak.The nation’s largest builder by sales, Centex Corp., is estimated to be worth $2.62 billion–just a quarter of the size of the largest Russell 2000 Index company. As the high housing inventory caused companies to cut prices, the second largest builder, D.R. Horton Inc., and Lennar Corp., the third largest, posted record losses in 2007. The 15 biggest publicly traded builders have written off $22.6 billion since 2006’s start, according to Bloomberg.