Operator
Thank you, the next question is coming from the line of Nishu Sood with Deutsche Bank. Please proceed with your question.
Nishu Sood, Deutsche Bank
Thanks. On the impairments, you know, I think, investors, you know, think of it as normal. A few call it fine tuning – impairments – you know, may be, $1 million to $3 million per quarter. Obviously, this quarter you mentioned the drivers of the more significant impairments but you also mentioned that with the return on capital strategy, there could be future impairments. So, saying that in a quarter of drawing that, I don’t know, the quarter where the impairments rose to more than $30 million, I think, probably has some people thinking that there could be large amounts, like we have this quarter, in future quarters as well. I know it’s difficult to tell, obviously, you know, you do the project evaluation and you figure out as you go. But maybe if you could just give us some sense of what you meant by that. Do you mean that there will be significant impairments, you know, in the ballpark, as we saw in this quarter, in future quarters? What exactly did you mean by that?
Jeff Kaminski, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
What we meant, Steven, is that we evaluated on a community by community basis and we want to put proper, I guess, framework around for the streak. We are very serious about improving our return on investing capital. We will be looking at monetization of various assets on the balance sheet. As Jeff mentioned, we activated over 30 communities over the past couple of years at a very low level of impairment. We did have a higher impairment quarter, this quarter, but we did not mean to imply that, that would be normal on a go-for basis. I think it was just a cautionary statement that other could be additional impairments in the future. We would pursue that strategy but we are not necessarily saying you should model. You should certainly not model impairment levels that we saw in the most recent quarter.
Nishu Sood, Deutsche Bank
Ok thanks. That’s very helpful. The second question. There have been a lot of questions regarding Texas already. I wanted to dig in – in a little more detail. I am, you know, sure you are keeping a very close pulse on it. Forward-looking indicators – so, you know, you would not have expected just because oil prices fell on the headlines, that, you would have seen demands fall apart already. But, maybe, forward-looking indicators – as you talked to your folks on ground in Houston and in other parts of Texas as well – traffic, you know, anecdotally; sentiment, you know, maybe in the move up segment, which might be expected to see more of a headline awareness; anything forward-looking, you know, that you have gathered in terms of pulse you are keeping on the market, that, you know, leads you to lean one way or the other for the next couple of quarters.
Jeff Mezger, President, Chief Executive Officer and Director
We are always watchful on the issue of traffic trends and if some company has a lay-off, we hear about that pretty quickly, and, that’s a data point, you do not want to ignore. As I looked at our book of business in preparation of the call, I would say, that our first time buyer communities, that are lower priced, are more value oriented products, and are selling better in Houston today. That could be that the higher price buyer has softened a little bit, I don’t know. But as we shared, right now the consumer performance is pretty typical. We are not seeing any signs that they are pulling back.
Jeff Kaminski, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
I think the best quarter indicators that we have right now is, sort of, quarter-to-date sales performance in Houston, and in Texas, and in the Central region in general. It has been pretty strong. I mean, it’s tracking right along our community count growth. And the traffic in the 4th Quarter in the Central region was up nicely versus prior year, both on a per community basis and on an overall basis. So, we’re not seeing the indications right now, although, you know, with all the news and the concerns, that have been, economically, on the state, I’d like to say, that we’re facing, looking at it and evaluating it on a measured basis. So, you know, we are not overly bullish on it but up to this point we really haven’t seen much impact from all the headline news that you have been seeing.
