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As America’s largest home-improvement retailer, Home Depot is often seen as a proxy for the US housing market. On that basis, its $18.25bn acquisition of speciality building products supplier SRS Distribution, including debt, offers good news and bad.
The deal will greatly expand Home Depot’s reach among contractors and builders. These professionals already account for about half of the Home Depot’s sales, with the remaining coming from regular do-it-yourself customers.
This push into the professional market suggests Home Depot thinks the broader housing market will remain frozen. Existing home sales, which make up most of the housing market, dropped to their lowest level in almost three decades last year. Homeowners who have locked in on low mortgage rates are reluctant to sell, limiting the supply of houses for sale.
At the same time, elevated interest rates and home prices have kept would-be buyers on the sidelines. A healthy housing market should have four to six months of inventory. In February, the latest month for which data is available, there was only about 2.9 months.
The paralysis has prompted house-hunters to turn to new builds. Professional homebuilders and their suppliers have benefited. SRS, which counts professional roofers, landscapers and pool contractors as its primary customers, reported a 12 per cent increase in sales to $9.8bn last year. By contrast, Home Depot suffered a 3 per cent decline in full-year revenues as its retail customers put off big DIY projects. Rival Lowe’s reported an even steeper 11 per cent drop in annual sales.
Wooing professional contractors and tradespeople makes sense. They visit stores more frequently and tend to spend more compared with DIY customers. Yet the market remains very fragmented. Home Depot has been acting as a sector consolidator with the acquisition of HD Supply for $8bn in 2020 and two smaller purchases last year.
This is one of Home Depot’s biggest buys to date. The deal values SRS at about 16.5 times last year’s adjusted Ebitda; Home Depot, with better margins, trades on roughly the same multiple. But the debt to fund the purchase will push its leverage ratio, on a debt/Ebitdar basis, to 2.5 times. Share buybacks will be suspended until it returns to 2 times.
That could give investors pause. For everyone else, the retailer’s determination to push harder into the pros market reflects its limited faith in a revival in housing more generally.
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