Jim Cramer on Lennar Earnings: "Technically Mixed But Mostly Bad Set of Numbers"

Lennar Corporation (NYSE:LEN) is one of the stocks Jim Cramer offered insights on. Cramer said that the company posted “mostly bad set of numbers,” as he remarked:

“Let’s start with Lennar. It turned in a technically mixed but mostly bad set of numbers on Tuesday night. The good news, deliveries came in better than expected, up 4% year-over-year. Total revenues also surprised the upside, although they still declined 6% from the previous year. That’s not good. Within the core home building segment, revenues and average sales price both exceeded expectations even as they represented declines of 7 and 10%, respectively. The bad news, the most important thing, profitability, or the lack thereof. Lennar’s home-building gross margin came in at 17.0%. That was down over 500 basis points year-over-year and well below expectations. I always look at gross margins when I do home builders. That’s my number one metric.

Home building operating earnings were down 52% year-over-year, much worse than expected, and Lennar only earned $2.3 per share. Wall Street was looking for $2.26. That’s an almost 50% decline year-over-year. That’s not good. It gets worse. With every quarter, Lennar also gives us some more forward-looking metrics, and those painted a pretty discouraging picture. New orders, they came in lower than expected. The average sales price for new orders was in line with expectations. That’s good, but still below the average selling prices for deliveries this past quarter, and it was down huge year-over-year.

Lennar’s guidance for the current quarter, weak. The company expects to deliver 17,000-18,000 homes in the current quarter, well below the 20,089 number that Wall Street was looking for. That was shocking to me. Management says the average sales price for these homes will be between $365,000-$375,000. And they’re talking about a home building gross margin coming in between 15 and 16%. Both of those represent deterioration from the quarter they just reported.

How about the full-year forecast for 2026? Lennar’s guidance for deliveries was also weaker than expected. Man. Now, Lennar has been pretty transparent about its strategy. They’re focused on keeping volumes up, and they’re willing to make sacrifices on price and incentives in order to keep moving lots of inventory. Admirable, but their strategy comes with a big hit to profitability. Worse, when you look at the new orders numbers and the forward guidance, it doesn’t seem to be working. Even with Lennar giving buyers great deals, demand still seems to be softening. And you understand, these guys are fantastic at what they do, so this was shocking to me… In my opinion, Miller (CEO Stuart Miller) sounded a little befuddled by how long it’s taken to get the housing market back on its feet. Lennar has already cut its prices a great deal at this point.”

Lennar Corporation (NYSE:LEN) builds and sells single-family and multifamily homes, develops residential land, and manages rental properties for buyers ranging from first-time to luxury.

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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.