“If we have a couple of years of holding serve, if you will, on this incredible price appreciation in the home, we don't see that impacting demand.”

In context

“for home improvement demand. You're concerned that home prices could stay flattish or potentially decline from here and does that alter your view on the demand outlook for the near to medium term? Ted Decker: So it hasn't as of yet. And this is the what we're seeing. I mean we talk about home price appreciation, transactions, household formation, et cetera, multiple inputs on housing but the strongest and most correlated for our sales is home price appreciation. Now that's gone up, as Richard said, 30%, 40% in the last couple of years, which we believe, translates to high $8 trillion, $9 trillion of increased wealth with what is our core customer base. So when mortgage rates touched at 6% there for a minute, certainly, you saw new home construction in mortgage rates feel that immediately. If we have a couple of years of holding serve, if you will, on this incredible price appreciation in the home, we don't see that impacting demand. The fact that we're not going up year after year after year is less the point that we've gone up so much in the past two years and the equity position in these homes are so strong coupled again with people spending more time in their homes, so repair and remodel, demand is going to increase from wear and tear. You're going to want more space and just improvements in the home because you're there more often. And then the fact that the US home stock is aging, and of course, it ages every year, but it's aging disproportionately because we had so many of those years or we underbuilt in housing. So now we have well over half the homes in the United States over 40 years old. So all those factors with that incredibly strong run-up in value, we think supports home improvement for some time to com”