Part AV HedNew Economic Thinking and Real EstateTable 2.1 Developers’ profits 1989 to 2008Profits as a % of Profit as a% of costs Position in the propertyYear turnover (Equivalence) cycle1989/90 23% 30% Peak1992/93 10% 11% Falling market; point of inflection1994/95 13% 15% Slow recovering market2000/01 15% 18% A rising market2002/03 16% 19% A continuing rising market2007 19% 25% Nearing top of the marketSource: Adapted from Barker (2003) and company accounts published in 2008.squeezed in a falling market. A portrait of their volatility in the years leading up to the crash in 2008 is presented in Table 2.1. The data is drawn from the profits record of a number of house builders,One concern in the post-recession years was the vulnerability of the residential development sector to the general downturn in economic activity. To paraphrase the Construction Industry Council (2009: 9): the housing market was the first to feel the cold chill winds of recession and will be the last to see the green shoots of recovery. There were certainly significant structural changes, as the number of small builders that survived the crash was greatly reduced and, through increased levels of consoli- dation, more power fell into the hands of a big five companies, namely: Barratt Developments, Taylor Wimpey, Persimmon, Berkeley Group Holdings and Bellway.As this chapter has implied, these UK house builders are big business players and, as such, are primarily interested in ‘lining their own pockets’; and an initial examination of the key financial information relating to these big five firms would suggest that they have managed to do just that, regardless of the recession. They adopted a strategy of ‘prioritising margin over volume’ (Taylor Wimpey, 2011) -or, as Barratt Developments (2011: 5) expressed it, ‘maximising value rather than driving volumes’. In plain English: in the midst of the recession, big house builders focused on squeezing as much as possible from the most profitable sites, rather than maximising their overall housing output.