Meritage Homes Corporation Quarterly report pursuant to Section 13 or 15(d)

Quarterly report pursuant to Section 13 or 15(d)

REAL ESTATE AND CAPITALIZED INTEREST (Tables)

REAL ESTATE AND CAPITALIZED INTEREST (Tables)

3 Months Ended

Mar. 31, 2017

Real estate consists of the following (in thousands):



	As of
	March 31, 2017		December 31, 2016
Homes under contract under construction ⁽¹⁾	$	617,790	$	508,927
Unsold homes, completed and under construction ⁽¹⁾	395,841		431,725
Model homes ⁽¹⁾	149,872		147,406
Finished home sites and home sites under development ⁽²⁾	1,349,350		1,334,005
Total	$	2,512,853	$	2,422,063


(1)	Includes the allocated land and land development costs associated with each lot for these homes.

(2)

Includes raw land, land held for development and land held for sale. Land held for development primarily reflects land and land development costs related to land where development activity is not currently underway but is expected to begin in the future. For these parcels, we may have chosen not to currently develop certain land holdings as they typically represent a portion or phases of a larger land parcel that we plan to build out over several years. We do not capitalize interest for inactive assets, and all ongoing costs of land ownership (i.e. property taxes, homeowner association dues, etc.) are expensed as incurred.

Summary of Capitalized Interest

A summary of our capitalized interest is as follows (in thousands):



	Three Months Ended March 31,
	2017			2016
Capitalized interest, beginning of period	$	68,196		$	61,202
Interest incurred	17,895			17,559
Interest expensed	(825		)	(3,288		)
Interest amortized to cost of home and land closings	(14,381		)	(11,347		)
Capitalized interest, end of period ⁽¹⁾	$	70,885		$	64,126


(1)	Approximately $47,000 and $130,000 of the capitalized interest is related to our joint venture investments and is a component of Investments in unconsolidated entities on our consolidated balance sheet as of March 31, 2017 and December 31, 2016, respectively.