The U.S. housing market continues to roll along, fed by an increased appeal of suburban and rural living during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as low interest rates.
In this article, we’ll first look at publicly traded home builders and then take a screen of Wall Street’s favorite housing-related stocks by reviewing four ETFs that hold shares of builders, building suppliers, home-improvement retailers, land developers and other companies that provide services in the industry.
The data are for calendar years. Some sales figures for 2020 are estimated by analysts for companies with fiscal years or quarters that don’t match the calendar. You can see that seven of the 15 builders increased sales by double digits during 2020, but that all of them improved their operating margins . That shows the effect of pricing power and low interest rates.
Even though the analysts look out to 2022 for sales estimates , their price targets and ratings are based only on what they expect over the next 12 months. So for many of these stocks, the analysts expect the market to take a breather, even though they see good times continuing in 2022.