Housing Is Bottoming, and It's Providing a Floor

Bob Toll of Toll Brothers (TOL - commentary - Cramer's Take) says it right: Bernanke and Geithner and Obama have made you seem crazy if you don't buy a house now. They are throwing so many incentives your way and the housing companies are so desperate to sell with special features thrown in that you have to wonder why you wouldn't buy right now in most areas, simply because you have to wonder how much better it is ever going to get. You are competing against no one, the seller is desperate for you and will make things as easy as possible for you, the rates are the lowest in our lifetime, when you add in the perks and the tax breaks, the houses are back to levels that are before the housing boom.

It is a kind of "what are you waiting for?" situation.

I know that mortgage availability was supposed to be an issue, but it is an issue only if you are not willing to put down money. But if you have $60,000, you can buy a $300,000 house. That's simply reasonable.

Of course, some areas are not done going down. We all know that.

But many others are.

Some people are going to lose their jobs.

Many others aren't.

To me the fact that Bob Toll had his first good weekend in ages -- as he said in an interview last night with Susie Gharib -- is interesting, not because he had one but because he has been so bearish that it's a clear change of pace.

There will be many setbacks to house price stabilization: job loss, neighborhood blight, lack of mortgage availability. But the forces in favor of house stabilization are now greater than those against. Which is why, when people ask me what has really happened to help cause a bottom, I say, "Housing."

I reiterate my once-ludicrous forecast that housing will bottom this summer and that what you saw when the Dow stopped going down was the bottom in housing, not in the economy. But right now, that's enough. If you agree, you don't have to buy the homebuilders, they have many issues and build homes in many regions that are still bad and are actually getting worse. You buy banks, because they are the repositories of mortgages that will not go back at the same torrid pace because of this Toll bottom.

Random musings: Terrible blow to Geithner when Frank Brosens, one of the great money managers out there, pulled out from the big rescue job last night. Nobody better than Frank, most people who worked with him at Goldman Sachs (GS - commentary - Cramer's Take) would say.

At the time of publication, Cramer was long Goldman Sachs.

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Know what you own: Other companies in the homebuilder industry include Lennar (LEN - commentary - Cramer's Take), Centex (CTX - commentary - Cramer's Take), Pulte (PHM - commentary - Cramer's Take), KB Home (KBH - commentary - Cramer's Take) and Meritage (MTH - commentary - Cramer's Take).

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