Case 10-3

I'm throwing out my thoughts on question 1 for the current case.

1. Evaluate Patten's business strategy.

My first thought centered around the fact that Patten's real expertise is
in real estate development. They have a well thought out strategy of who the
customer is and how to sell effectively to these customers. They have
developed a good business relationship with the large property owners. With
little risk they analyze their ability to subdivide the properties. Once
this is completed and the land purchased, they unleash their marketing
strategy.
The marketing strategy seems to effectively gain sales without
extravegant costs. The sales staff is custom designed to relate personally
to the average customer. Their gross margin for land sales is 54.8%. Even
if you include the selling, general and admin expense their margin is 24%.
The part of their business strategy I struggle with is the finance
business. What do a bunch of land developers know about finance. In my
opinion land financing should be left to the experts. If they established a
preferred financing company, they could negotiate a standard finders fee for
the loans. More importantly they would eliminate the risk in their revenue
streams. When they make a sale the revenue could be immediately booked since
they would not hold the debt, the finance company would. Their current
portfolio of notes receivable is $18.6M. It looks like ignoring expenses
their financing margin is 3%. This only gives $0.56M in revenues. This
number seems pretty small compared to the accounting heartburn it creates.
Obviously this number would be much smaller if they were properly estimating
unrecoverables.
I guess the bottom line is "what is their core competency"? I believe
its land development not land finance.

Anyway give me your thoughts and I'll clean it up in a word document.

Jimmy