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Under the Magnifying Glass: CEOs May Operate Above Real Estate Trends

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By Michelle Leder
August 29, 2006

As summer winds down, signs of the sluggish real estate market are becoming increasingly hard to ignore. Even if you’re not trying to sell right now, chances are you’ve been assigned to do a story about the real estate bubble.

No matter what hard numbers you look at – be they housing starts, builder confidence, sales of existing homes, inventories and the length of time that a house takes to sell, foreclosures, sales and earnings projections for various large home builders and even those in related-industries like home improvement chain Lowe’s, whose CEO warned recently that the rest of the year wasn’t looking so good because of the “challenging economic environment” – the numbers are equally grim.

But there is one group that is managing to insulate themselves from the messiness of the current real estate market: top executives at some of this country’s largest publicly traded companies. Think the idea of uber-capitalists engaging in something reminiscent of Eastern Europe circa-1986 seems distasteful? Think again.

Since the beginning of summer, at least a half dozen companies, including eBay and Nike, have disclosed in their routine Securities and Exchange Commission filings how they’re protecting their executives from market forces. Using words such as “protection against loss” or “loss protection” or even “price protection”, the companies are essentially guaranteeing that these executives’ homes will sell for a fixed price. The easiest way to find these perks is to quickly skim the employment contracts that companies routinely file with the SEC when a new executive is hired or fired.

While still pretty new and rare, the trend isn’t just limited to large companies, or those located in a particular part of the country or even those in a particular industry. Indeed, while two compensation consultants said they hadn’t yet seen this in their own practices, it’s probably only a matter of time before this particular perk catches on.

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