UK's Berkeley cautious about housing market but maintains profit guidanceย
Recasts, adds analyst comment
By Suban Abdulla
LONDON, March 10 (Reuters) -British house builder Berkeley Group Holdings Plc BKGH.L maintained its 2023 outlook on Friday and said house prices remained firm, but added it was cautious as sales are falling amid volatility in the property market.
The FTSE 100 .FTSE listed developer said UK housing sales since the end of September were down around 25% from the September to February period of the previous year.
Berkeley said its sales pricing in the four months to Feb. 28 remained firm and above business plan levels.
"This is a resilient performance in the context of the market volatility since the end of September and reflects the underlying demand for quality homes in London and the South East," the company said in a statement.
Britain's property sector has cooled and house prices have fallen from pandemic highs as demand suffered from higher borrowing costs and lower mortgage approvals.
However, some indicators have pointed to a slight uptick in the sector, with data from Halifax bank earlier this week showing an unexpected jump in prices last month, potentially reflecting improvements in mortgage rates and consumer confidence.
Berkeley's update chimed with other major British homebuilders Persimmon PSN.L, Barratt Development BDEV.L and Taylor Wimpey TW.L which have recently flagged similar market setbacks that have hit their profit margins and building targets.
Victoria Scholar, head of investment at interactive investor, an online investment platform, said the housing market is still reeling from market turmoil last September triggered by then prime minister Liz Truss's fiscal policies.
"The stark contrast in financial performance pre and post September highlights the extent to which the mini-budgetโs fallout for mortgage costs caused shockwaves across the housing market," Scholar said.
Berkeley said it will continue to focus on cost control, with build cost inflation showing early signs of moderating.
The company maintained its profit forecast of about 600 million pounds ($720 million) for the full year to April 30, against 551.5 million pounds in the previous year. It expects pre-tax earnings of at least 1.05 billion pounds for 2024 and 2025 fiscal years.
($1 = 0.8372 pounds)
Reporting by Suban Abdulla and Yadarisa Shabong; Editing by Sonia Cheema, Bradley Perrett and Susan Fenton
๊ด๋ จ ์์ฐ
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๋ฉด์ฑ ์กฐํญ: XM Group ํ์ฌ๋ ์ฒด๊ฒฐ ์ ์ฉ ์๋น์ค์ ์จ๋ผ์ธ ๊ฑฐ๋ ํ๋ซํผ์ ๋ํ ์ ๊ทผ์ ์ ๊ณตํ์ฌ, ๊ฐ์ธ์ด ์น์ฌ์ดํธ์์ ๋๋ ์น์ฌ์ดํธ๋ฅผ ํตํด ์ด์ฉ ๊ฐ๋ฅํ ์ฝํ ์ธ ๋ฅผ ๋ณด๊ฑฐ๋ ์ฌ์ฉํ ์ ์๋๋ก ํ์ฉํฉ๋๋ค. ์ด์ ๋ํด ๋ณ๊ฒฝํ๊ฑฐ๋ ํ์ฅํ ์๋๋ ์์ต๋๋ค. ์ด๋ฌํ ์ ๊ทผ ๋ฐ ์ฌ์ฉ์๋ ๋ค์ ์ฌํญ์ด ํญ์ ์ ์ฉ๋ฉ๋๋ค: (i) ์ด์ฉ ์ฝ๊ด, (ii) ์ํ ๊ฒฝ๊ณ , (iii) ์์ ๋ฉด์ฑ ์กฐํญ. ๋ฐ๋ผ์, ์ด๋ฌํ ์ฝํ ์ธ ๋ ์ผ๋ฐ์ ์ธ ์ ๋ณด์ ๋ถ๊ณผํฉ๋๋ค. ํนํ, ์จ๋ผ์ธ ๊ฑฐ๋ ํ๋ซํผ์ ์ฝํ ์ธ ๋ ๊ธ์ต ์์ฅ์์์ ๊ฑฐ๋์ ๋ํ ๊ถ์ ๋ ์ ์์ด ์๋๋๋ค. ๊ธ์ต ์์ฅ์์์ ๊ฑฐ๋๋ ์๋ณธ์ ์๋นํ ์ํ์ ์๋ฐํฉ๋๋ค.
์จ๋ผ์ธ ๊ฑฐ๋ ํ๋ซํผ์ ๊ณต๊ฐ๋ ๋ชจ๋ ์๋ฃ๋ ๊ต์ก/์ ๋ณด ๋ชฉ์ ์ผ๋ก๋ง ์ ๊ณต๋๋ฉฐ, ๊ธ์ต, ํฌ์์ธ ๋๋ ๊ฑฐ๋ ์กฐ์ธ ๋ฐ ๊ถ๊ณ , ๊ฑฐ๋ ๊ฐ๊ฒฉ ๊ธฐ๋ก, ๊ธ์ต ์ํ ๋๋ ์์น ์๋ ๊ธ์ต ํ๋ก๋ชจ์ ์ ๊ฑฐ๋ ์ ์ ๋๋ ๊ถ์ ๋ฅผ ํฌํจํ์ง ์์ผ๋ฉฐ, ํฌํจํด์๋ ์๋ฉ๋๋ค.
์ด ์น์ฌ์ดํธ์ ํฌํจ๋ ๋ชจ๋ ์๊ฒฌ, ๋ด์ค, ๋ฆฌ์์น, ๋ถ์, ๊ฐ๊ฒฉ, ๊ธฐํ ์ ๋ณด ๋๋ ์ 3์ ์ฌ์ดํธ์ ๋ํ ๋งํฌ์ ๊ฐ์ด XM์ด ์ค๋นํ๋ ์ฝํ ์ธ ๋ฟ๋ง ์๋๋ผ, ์ 3์ ์ฝํ ์ธ ๋ ์ผ๋ฐ ์์ฅ ๋ ผํ์ผ๋ก์ "ํ์ฌ" ๊ธฐ์ค์ผ๋ก ์ ๊ณต๋๋ฉฐ, ํฌ์ ์กฐ์ธ์ผ๋ก ์ฌ๊ฒจ์ง์ง ์์ต๋๋ค. ๋ชจ๋ ์ฝํ ์ธ ๊ฐ ํฌ์ ๋ฆฌ์์น๋ก ํด์๋๋ ๊ฒฝ์ฐ, ํฌ์ ๋ฆฌ์์น์ ๋ ๋ฆฝ์ฑ์ ์ด์งํ๊ธฐ ์ํด ๊ณ ์๋ ๋ฒ์ ์๊ฑด์ ๋ฐ๋ผ ์ฝํ ์ธ ๊ฐ ์๋๋์ง ์์์ผ๋ฉฐ, ์ค๋น๋์ง ์์๋ค๋ ์ ์ ์ธ์งํ๊ณ ๋์ํด์ผ ํฉ๋๋ค. ๋ฐ๋ผ์, ๊ด๋ จ ๋ฒ๋ฅ ๋ฐ ๊ท์ ์ ๋ฐ๋ฅธ ๋ง์ผํ ์ปค๋ฎค๋์ผ์ด์ ์ด๋ผ๊ณ ๊ฐ์ฃผ๋ฉ๋๋ค. ์ฌ๊ธฐ์์ ์ ๊ทผํ ์ ์๋ ์์ ์ธ๊ธํ ์ ๋ณด์ ๋ํ ๋น๋ ๋ฆฝ ํฌ์ ๋ฆฌ์์น ๋ฐ ์ํ ๊ฒฝ๊ณ ์๋ฆผ์ ์ฝ๊ณ , ์ดํดํ์๊ธฐ ๋ฐ๋๋๋ค.