Stock market recommendations: FirstService reports higher revenue, lower earnings

FirstService Corp., symbol FSV on Toronto, serves the following areas of the real-estate market: commercial real estate; residential property management; and property improvement. We analyze FirstService in Stock Pickers Digest, our newsletter that gives you our aggressive stock market recommendations. In the three months ended March 31, 2011, FirstService’s revenue jumped 18.9%, to $478.4 million from $402.4 million a year earlier (all figures except share prices in U.S. dollars). The company saw higher revenue across all of its divisions: the commercial real-estate division’s revenue jumped 26.9%; residential-property-management revenue rose 14.6%; and property-services revenue rose 12.9%. Even with the higher revenue, earnings per share fell 6.7%, to $0.14 from $0.15, because of costs to integrate acquisitions. As well, the company’s commercial real-estate division hired more workers to prepare for future growth. FirstService’s long term debt of $259.3 million is a low 23.3% of its $1.1-billion market cap. We’ve updated our buy/sell/hold advice on FirstService and 19 other aggressive stock market recommendations in the latest issue of Stock Pickers Digest. You can get this issue, along with 5 in-depth Special Reports and much more when you take a no-risk 1-month trial to Stock Pickers Digest today. Click here to learn how.

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Jim Bates

Jim is an associate editor at TSI Network. He is the lead reporter and analyst for The Successful Investor and Wall Street Stock Forecaster and a member of the Investment Planning Committee. Jim has held the Chartered Financial Analyst designation since 1992 and spent more than a decade at the Financial Post DataGroup before joining TSI Network. He has a Bachelor of Commerce degree from the University of Toronto.

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