It ramped up promotional activity to clear inventory in Western Europe and China, a smart way to handle the situation, and unlikely to happen again.
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Higher promotional activity to help lower inventory would also be a contributing factor to lower earnings.
Housing experts have summed up 2012 as the year of the bottom, with national-level home prices finally beginning to rise as sales activity bounded and both inventory levels and mortgage rates plunged.
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This investor activity is contributing to very low inventory levels, which increases demand and helps drive up prices for all homes in these markets.
The balance between retail sales and wholesale inventories is critical because it allows us to gauge whether consumer activity is sufficient to spur future inventory orders.
All of the activity means that, like housing, inventory levels have markedly dropped.
First, you'd see more of an inventory-reduction-driven rebound in activity.
Decrease in activity coupled with fierce competition from investors targeting distressed inventory means the possibility of picking up a decent fixer-upper at a discounted price from the bank has greatly narrowed.
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Such activity creatively destroys many old bankable assets, such as real estate, storefronts and inventory, turning them into "legacy problems" -- albatrosses of land, concrete and steel.
Construction activity is withering, a dreadful development for the industry but one that is reducing inventory and sowing the seeds for an eventual recovery of home prices.
Other applications will monitor other types of activity such as a spike in traffic to parts of web sites or a change in inventory levels and post notifications.
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