The Times Herald (Norristown, PA)
Sales of new homes plunged 18.2% in February
The 60-to-100 positions the company wants to hire for — mechanical assemblers, Seakeeper calls them — it needed last week, or last month.
These are good jobs, Moser stresses, with competitive pay in a clean environment. And while Seakeeper has roles for skilled workers such as experienced machinists, there’s on-the-job training available for some openings as well.
“You don’t go to school to build a gyroscope,” Moser said. “You might be an HVAC person, or a plumber.
“All of that makes the environment one where, first of all, it is learnable. It’s not too difficult. At the same time, we can bring people in who might have some mechanical aptitude and quickly train them.”
Seakeeper employs 100 people already at its Mohnton location. In five years, the company plans to have 250 people working in Berks.
Even at that size, it will remain a tight-knit operation compared to some.
“We’re still a relatively small company,” Barrett said. “Our engineers, our CEO, they’re all working out of the Mohnton facility.
“Andrew Semprevivo, the CEO, when you’re walking around the factory with him, he knows everybody’s name that’s there, so there’s this family feel of being together.”
It’s unusual for a boating company to place its headquarters in a landlocked place, rather than near an ocean — a curiosity not overlooked by Seakeeper.
“I’ve taken boat builders or customers and vendors on walkthroughs, and halfway through it’s, ‘This is really cool, but why are you here,’” Moser said. “‘why are you not on the coast?’”
Seakeeper’s ties to the area were born out of its working relationship with Joma, which was owned by Moser, a Berks native.
Now, as the company plans to move operations yet again, this time to a permanent location where it can really flex its muscle, the company maintains it is “100% committed” to staying in the county.
“That workforce, that infrastructure we invested in is so valuable,” Moser said. “We have 100 people with specific skill sets, who trained with us, invested with us. The county is a great place to live, a good place to work, good communities. There’s a lot of manufacturing-capable people here.
“I don’t think we can imagine being anywhere else anymore. It’s just who we are.”
It could take anywhere from six months to two years until Seakeeper has a new home and is fully operational there.
“Wherever we do end up, it will be in Berks County and it will be a decision made to keep our workforce,” Barrett said.
Long-term, Seakeeper only sees its footprint continuing to expand, both in Berks and throughout the boating industry.
“We’re going after what was the founder’s original vision: to get gyroscopes on every boat,” Moser said.
“My sense is we will rival any Berks County-headquartered company in terms of revenue and people very quickly.”
WASHINGTON >> Sales of new homes plunged 18.2% in February as severe winter weather in many parts of the country and a lack of supply took a toll on the housing industry.
Sales of single-family homes dropped to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 775,000 last month, the Commerce Department reported Tuesday, the slowest sales pace since May of last year.
Every region of the country experienced a drop-off in sales.
The median price of a new home sold in February was $349,400, up 5.3% from a year ago.
The same weather disruption was evident in the existing homes market, for which the U.S. released data Monday. The National Association of Realtors said that existing homes sales in February fell 6.6% from January to a seasonally-adjusted rate of 6.22 million annualized units. Sales were up 9.1% from February last year, before the pandemic upended the economy and temporarily held up home sales last spring.
The report Tuesday from the Commerce Department marked the first decline in sales of new homes in two months. Housing continues to be one of the few bright spots during the coronavirus pandemic. New home sales last year advanced to levels not seen since the housing boom of the mid-2000s.
For February, sales fell in every part of the country, led by a 37.5% drop in the Midwest and a 16.4% fall in the West. Sales declines 14.7% in the South and were down 11.6% in the Northeast.
Despite the hiccup, economists don’t believe even skyrocketing prices will cool the U.S. housing market. High lumber costs, rising mortgage rates, though they remain near record lows, along with few properties available for sale, are pushing home ownership out of range for many.
“Home sales are still higher than a year earlier, and given the increased pace of building, new home sales should boom again this spring,” said Robert Frick, corporate economist at Navy Federal Credit Union.
Underscoring how quickly homes were snapped up last month, 74% of homes sold in February were on the market less than a month, the NAR said.
The fact that homes are being snapped up so quickly and prices continue to climb, with many homes receiving multiple offers, implies that it is the lack of supply that’s mainly behind February’s sales decline, said Lawrence Yun, NAR’s chief economist.
“It’s the reason why prices are rising,” Yun said. “Demand appears to be very strong, reflected in the days on the market being so swift.”