The majority of the Tennessee homes come from Maryville-based Clayton Homes, a subsidiary of Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc., which bought the company in 2003.
"For us, 2009 started off pretty rough," said Chris Nicely, vice president for marketing for 75-year-old Clayton. "So far, we're down about 13 percent overall in sales this year, but it could have been worse. When you look at other homebuilding companies, many of them would love to be down only 13 percent."
Clayton is expecting to ship about 28,000 homes this year, or 38 percent of the industry total. The company's seven Tennessee plants are expected to produce about 5,000 of those; the rest will come from the firm's other 30 plants scattered across the country, Nicely said.
The company's Tennessee sales are "still challenged," with Middle Tennessee off about 13 percent for the year, West Tennessee down about 10 percent and East Tennessee off about 17 percent, he said.
"In June, July and August, we have seen an increase in qualified traffic, and a great number of inquiries have been coming in over our Web site," Nicely said. "The number of homes sold has crept up. It's not anything to celebrate yet, but it gives us some reason to be optimistic about the rest of the year."
Clayton earlier this year laid off 90 workers at its corporate headquarters, leaving a staff of about 1,400, and has furloughed about 1,500 workers among its manufacturing plants over the past two years, leaving a work force of about 12,500.
In Tennessee, a plant in Ardmore was idled, and two plants each in Savannah and Bean Station were consolidated into one facility at each site, Nicely said.
The company remains profitable, however, and is expecting to post revenues of $3.5 billion to $3.7 billion for 2009, down from $4 billion in 2008, he said.
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