As my Foolish colleague Roland Head was quick to point out earlier this month, Taylor Wimpey (LSE: TW) faces a double-whammy of rising construction costs and flattening property price growth that is set to take a bite out of earnings growth.
The construction giant has grown earnings by double-digit percentages for many years now. But the number crunchers are now expecting earnings expansion to slow markedly from here, and are predicting rises of 5% and 3% in 2018 and 2019 respectively.
Clearly Taylor Wimpey may not be a go-to stock for growth hunters but, for dividend chasers, I believe it is difficult to look past the housebuilder.
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While a slowing UK economy and elevated buyer caution may be hampering homes demand compared with years gone by, the country’s housing stock is still insufficient enough to keep property values, broadly speaking, marching northwards. Indeed, Your Move reported earlier this week that home prices edged 0.6% higher in February from a year earlier.
And this stable backcloth means that the likes of Taylor Wimpey can maintain strong margins and solid cash generation, a promising omen for future dividends.
In this environment, City brokers think the FTSE 100 firm will pay dividends of 15.1p and 15.6p per share in 2018 and 2019 respectively, figures that yield 8.1% and 8.4% respectively.
At today’s prices Taylor Wimpey can be picked up on a forward P/E ratio of just 8.8 times. This is ludicrously cheap given the company’s proud growth record and the probability of earnings continuing to swell long into the future.
Box up a beauty
Another massive yielder I want to bring your attention to today is Tritax Big Box (LSE: BBOX).
I last lauded the company, which provides large logistics spaces in the UK to some of the world’s biggest retailers and fast-moving consumer goods companies, in January, thanks to the brilliant revenues opportunities created by the internet shopping boom.
The company advised last week that EPRA net asset value jumped 10.3% in 2017 to 142.24p per share. And my faith in the firm’s future profit prospects was emboldened when Tritax declared that: “The fundamentals of our market remain positive and are largely unaffected by current geopolitical and economic uncertainties.”
This confident outlook prompted the business to hike the dividend to 6.4p per share in 2017 from 6.2p in 2016. And it predicted extra payout progress in the current year, to 6.7p.
City analysts concur with Tritax’s dividend forecast, the payout supported by a predicted 17% earnings increase. As a consequence investors can enjoy a market-mashing 4.6% yield. And the good news does not stop here either. With profits expected to rise by a further 7% in 2019 the dividend is also expected to improve to 6.9p, meaning the yield moves to a splendid 4.7%.
Tritax may not be packing the same sort of value as Taylor Wimpey, the FTSE 250 company sporting a forward P/E ratio of 19.6 times. But this does not darken its investibility, in my opinion.
