Home sales in Hawaii were slow, the company said, with new orders for homes down 60 percent from the equivalent period of last year.
Bottom-line comparisons with the year-earlier quarter are skewed by a $104 million charge in the 1995 period to allow for a write-down of the company's resort properties on Lanai to what was determined to be their fair value.
As a result there was a net loss in the 1995 quarter of $100.9 million.
Without that charge, the three months ended Sept. 30, 1995, would have shown a profit of $2.9 million, so the figures reported today show that in its day-to-day business, the Los Angeles-based company did not do as well this year.
This year's third-quarter revenues, $91.7 million, were up 25 percent from the revenues of $73.4 million in the 1995 period. The difference was mostly due to the mainland property sales, consisting of three apartment buildings in Bakersfield, Calif., and a business building in Mississippi, which together brought in $37.5 million in revenues.
"Our Hawaii residential operations continue to experience a very difficult market," said David H. Murdock, Castle's chairman and chief executive. "New orders for the quarter were about 40 percent of those experienced for the same quarter in 1995 and our operating margins continue to suffer."
Murdock said the company has slowed the start of new-home construction and is aggressively marketing its homes.
Operations on Lanai, where the company owns the Lodge at Koele, the Manele Bay Hotel, a golf course and some housing developments, showed a slight improvement over last year, Murdock said.
The Lanai resort operations had an operating loss before depreciation of $4.5 million for the latest quarter, compared with a loss of $5.1 million in the year-earlier period.
In the Oahu residential market, it wasn't only sales that were down; prices were down too, the company said. The average sales price in the third quarter was $250,000, down 6.7 percent from $268,000 a year earlier.
The company sold 137 Oahu homes and two in California in the latest three months, compared with 334 on Oahu and 17 in California in the 1995 quarter.
As of Sept. 30, the company had a backlog of $42.8 million worth of homes sold but not delivered, compared with $93.4 million a year earlier.