Operator
Thank you. The next question is from the line of David Goldberg with UBS. Please ask your question.
David Goldberg, UBS
Thanks. I was wondering if you guys could give some more clarity on the return on capital focus and specifically what does that translate to. I mean, I assume, it means greater free cash load generation. If it is just the way that you invest capital on the market basis or is it thinking, may be, a little bit, paying down some debt, or, may be, set buy backs. I was wondering if you could give us some focus on, kind of, how you are thinking about maximizing return on capital, if it is going to become more efficient within the business.
Jeff Mezger, President, Chief Executive Officer and Director
David, I shared in my look back on history, we had to get to a higher scale to be able to sustain profits and we have done that. So, your first priority is to create a return and we have now done that and we are going to pull every [inaudible 25:33] to continue to improve profitability, so improve the return. On the other side of the equation, we think we can drive our growth with our own cash generation, whether it is from the things we talked about, monetizing all the assets, whether it’s selling some lots where we not have [inaudible 25:54] location. It is a general review every month of our balance sheet: where our assets are, what the status is, and what can we do to monetize things while continuing to grow our business. We know that overtime we want to get to an inventory turnover to wax, we are not there today. But, I think where you started with the comment on generating more cash – that’s where we’re starting. We want to drive or business with our balance sheet and not have to go access the markets anymore.
Operator
The next question is from the line of Megan McGrath from MKM. Please proceed with your question.
Megan McGrath, MKM
Good Morning. Thanks. I want to ask a little bit about your expectations for community count growth. Among what sounds like a relatively cautious outlook for the year, in terms of the soft demand continuing. And if you can comment specifically – you talked a little bit about Inland, California – could you talk a little bit about, if you are seeing anything in Texas now, specifically in Houston, as we started to see some [inaudible 25:54]. And also, has the expectation that Houston could be soft this year impacted your gross plans in that region? That was my question.
Jeff Mezger, President, Chief Executive Officer and Director
Ok. Megan, let me cover as many of as I can recall from your question. Let me start up top with a couple of comments. We entered the year with a community count of 19%. We normally don’t like talking about trends within a quarter but in this case because we are halfway through our 1st Quarter, we can share that our sales are tracking within range this quarter of our community count growth. Traffic levels remained solid. Sales per community are pretty consistent with what we saw in Q-4. So, we like how we are positioned; my comments on the gross are more relative to, in some locations we are seeing some pressure on pricing, while we are also seeing some pressure on cost. So, we are selling homes but in some cases we have to do some things to alter the sales rate strategy in that community. If you go specific to Texas, our trends there are very similar to what we are seeing around the rest of the system.
Our sales per community are holding fine. Traffic is up. It is tracking with the community counts. We are seeing no indication of any pull back by the consumer at this time. We are sensitive to the Houston situation. We are very watchful right now. In fact we have actually pulled out of a couple of land transactions in the 4th quarter because of our sensitivity there. So, we are going to keep an eye on it and see how things develop, as there is more clarity on the economy there. Having said all that, I would like to kick it to Jeff to give some clarity to what our Houston business really mean to our Texas business relative to the whole company. There has been a lot of different numbers spinning out there.
