The wave of software-sector job cuts around Seattle is now showing up in home sales, D.R. Horton told investors Tuesday, as America’s largest homebuilder beat earnings estimates but trimmed its full-year outlook and pointed to softening demand in the Pacific Northwest.
For its fiscal third quarter, ended June 30, the Arlington, Texas company reported earnings of $3.20 per diluted share, down from $3.36 a year earlier but comfortably ahead of the roughly $2.99 analysts had expected. Net income came in at $905 million on consolidated revenue of $9.2 billion, with a pre-tax margin of 13.3%. The homebuilding unit generated $8.69 billion in revenue, up about 1.2% from a year earlier, and the company closed 23,983 homes during the quarter.
The tone shifted when executives described where demand is holding and where it is fraying. On the earnings call, they pointed to relative strength across the northern footprint — the Mid-Atlantic states, the Ohio Valley and the Midwest — but flagged growing weakness in the Northwest. Seattle drew specific mention: the company tied a pullback in buyer demand there directly to the shift in software employment and the mounting layoffs reshaping the region’s job base. It is a notable admission from a builder whose scale gives it an unusually broad read on local housing conditions.
The bigger driver of caution remains affordability. Elevated mortgage rates and higher ownership costs have kept buyers hesitant, and the company said it continues to lean on sales incentives to move product — a strategy management expects to maintain through the rest of the fiscal year, depending on where rates settle. Buyers, in the company’s telling, are still on the fence.
Those pressures showed up in the guidance. D.R. Horton lowered its fiscal 2026 revenue forecast to a range of $32.5 billion to $33 billion, down from a prior $33.5 billion to $34.5 billion and below the roughly $33.66 billion analysts had modeled. It also cut its projected home closings for the year to between 83,800 and 84,300, from an earlier 86,000 to 87,500. For the current fourth quarter, the builder guided to 22,500 to 23,000 closings and a home sales gross margin of 20.5% to 21%, roughly flat with the third quarter.
Even amid the softer demand, the company kept returning cash to shareholders. It repurchased 4.2 million shares for about $616 million during the quarter, bringing year-to-date buybacks to 14.6 million shares, and declared a quarterly dividend of 45 cents. It ended the period with 38,000 homes in inventory, down slightly from a year earlier, of which 7,600 were completed and 600 had sat unsold for more than six months. Management noted that the median time to build and close a home improved by about three weeks from a year ago, letting the company hold less inventory and turn it faster.
The Seattle comments carry a signal beyond one builder’s results. When the country’s largest homebuilder names a specific metro and ties its slowdown to tech-sector layoffs, it connects two stories JBiz readers track closely — the labor market and housing — and hints that white-collar job cuts are beginning to ripple into big-ticket consumer spending. With the Federal Reserve set to meet next week, the health of housing demand adds another data point to an already delicate rate debate.
JBizNews Desk | New York
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