Valley Voice Newspaper

Tulare County- Centex Corp. is relocating its Central Valley regional office from Visalia to Sacramento in a consolidation move that will mean many more lost jobs locally.

The news came out earlier this month after a lawsuit by the former head of the Centex Sacramento division said he was promised a bonus but instead lost his job when he was replaced by Mike Wyatt, who until now has been at the helm in Visalia and will now relocate to Sacramento.

After several rounds of layoffs in the past six months, a new round eliminated about 20 jobs in Visalia a few weeks ago, say sources familiar with the company. The company eliminated chief planner for new projects, Cliff Ronk's job, among others.
Now, the company has put its big 50,000-square-foot regional headquarters on Akers up for sublease.

The building is available now, according to a local real estate web site. Sources say the big builder will radically downsize its Visalia-based operation where the company had about 130 employees working in the office and field operations here as recently as a month ago.

With plans to consolidate in Sacramento, only a few employees and sales staff will remain in Visalia. Once the company leases its Akers building, it plans to relocate to a far smaller office.

CTX Closing Too

In addition to shutting down the regional office, sister company CTX Mortgage will be closing its retail office here at the end of August after a potential sale to another company – Prospect Mortgage – didn't happen. Greg Sherman, who works at the office, says he and colleagues at the CTX office plan to continue to do mortgage loans with a different company. “We're actually fairly busy,” says the veteran Visalia mortgage broker.

Centex has been Tulare County's largest builder for decades but its volume is less than a third of what it was just two years ago, reflecting the housing crunch nationwide and locally.

During the first seven months of 2008, Centex is slightly behind McMillin Homes in total value, building just 133 new homes in Tulare County, compared to 355 for the same period in 2006 when the local housing market was strong (see chart).

Centex used Visalia as a regional office since it bought the operation of Andy Mangano in 1991 and expanded year after year in the number of subdivisions and towns it built in the Central Valley. The big builder became a major employer here. For years, it was the busiest division for the Dallas-based builder in the state.

Moved to New Office

Centex moved to a vacant space in the big 150,000-square-foot Cigna Insurance building on Akers only a year ago, consolidating scattered offices into one location. Centex leased 50,000 square feet of the building that it now wants to sublease.

But a year later, the collapse of the new home market in California has apparently convinced Centex, like other builders, to pull up stakes here.

Sources say the company will still build new homes here, but no longer develop new subdivisions from the ground up. Instead, it will buy finished lots on an as-needed basis, having the effect of reducing its holding costs until it is ready to build.
In the lawsuit from the head of the Sacramento regional office, Doug Pautsch charged he was put in charge of the consolidated Sacramento, Central Valley (Visalia) and Reno divisions back in April and that Centex let him go without paying a promised $355,000 bonus.

Centex is the nation's third top builder based on houses sold. The company says it operates in 92 markets throughout the U.S. The company's stock has been declining, falling from about $58 a share two years ago to about $13.50 this week.
Calls for a comment from the Centex corporate office were not returned.

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