Home Depot’s strong quarterly housing market is still growing

New York
CNN Business
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Everyone at Home Depot has a message Economic deniers: Hold my plywood.

It posted better-than-expected profit in sales and revenue for the first quarter on Tuesday and raised its outlook for the rest of this fiscal year. Shares of Home Depot

(HD)One in 30 stocks DoveInitially the market was up more than 3% before the start, but was down slightly in the morning trade.

Shares rose widely despite Tuesday Weak income From Walmart, the retailer

(WMT), Another Dow component, which fell about 9%. Home Depot competitor Lowes

(Low)Its first-quarter earnings will report on Wednesday, down about 2%.

Home Depot is down This year has been a rough start Because of the high interest rates and high inflation, investors are worried about the downturn in housing. Despite the good news on Tuesday, stocks are still down nearly 30% in 2022.

But the new CEO is Ted Decker, who Took over from Craig Manner, head of the long-running Home Depot Earlier this year, it was exciting. He noted in a revenue release that sales were up nearly 4% to $ 38.9 billion a year earlier, the highest in the company’s first quarter in history.

“Stable performance in the quarter is still interesting compared to last year’s historic growth and this year has faced a slow start to spring,” Decker said.

During a conference call with analysts, Decker added, “Customers continue to tell us that their homes have never been more important and project setbacks are much healthier.” “The medium to long term foundations of demand for home improvement have never been strong,” he said.

Home Depot’s solid numbers can help ease some of the worries about the recession and the possible fall in house prices.

Yes, the Federal Reserve’s rate hike plans could lead to even higher mortgage rates. But experts point out that home sales must continue to burn in conjunction with a tight supply of new homes and a more healthy work market. This is good for home depots.

Higher mortgage rates “will undoubtedly pour cold water on the home market,” said Joe Lavorghna, chief economist at Natixis CIB, in a statement.

But he said, “It’s unusually difficult to detect the steepness of the housing price recession due to chronic national housing shortages – exacerbated by epidemic housing boom and current supply chain problems preventing new homes from being completed.”

LaVorgna thinks “the mid-single digit revision in home prices next year is perfectly reasonable.”

In other words, it is unlikely that housing prices will fall as completely as they did in the late 2000s. This is not a recurrence of the subprime mortgage boom and subsequent bust.

“The main problem for households is still the lack of supply. There is not enough outside to meet the demand, ”said Laura Adams, a senior real estate analyst at Aceable, an online real estate education site. “We do not expect this to be another bubble bursting. It may be gradually getting colder this year and next.