Michael Miller
Analyst · Truist Securities.
Yes, Keith, that's a great question. And I'm really glad you brought it up because we wanted to talk about it. So, we believe based on -- so this is at a macro level, based on the information from the Census Bureau that was delayed a little bit, but that recently came out that multifamily cycle times have basically normalized to kind of pre-COVID, pre-supply side disruptions. And that was really driven by the fact that for the full year, multifamily starts were up like 18% and units under construction were down 13%. So, we believe that the multifamily market is coming into, if you will, equilibrium. There will still be some headwinds. I think in the first half of -- I don't think I know, in the first half of this year. Our team has done, as much as we sing the praises of the heavy commercial business, the reality is that multifamily team across the country and particularly CQ, we call out all the time, have done an incredible job of just outperforming dramatically the market opportunity that exists there. We have a lot of confidence in their ability to continue to do that. I mean their backlogs are growing and they're doing a great job of increasing the complementary product penetration within multifamily. So, yes, I mean, based on the starts for '25 coming into '26 and recognizing that the cycle time for multifamily is much longer than it is for single-family, we think that bodes well for full year '26 on the multifamily side, especially given the easy comps that all of us in the industry are going to be facing as it relates to multifamily. I would say, too, just because we're talking about cycle times, on the single-family side, cycle times are probably the best they've ever been. And I think a lot of the big production builders have talked about how efficient their cycle times are currently. And again, building on some of the comments that we made earlier, when we, again, look at the business and the only part of the business that we were not really confident in is the single-family production builder business, because those cycle times are so tight at the entry level, as soon as there is an inflection, the inflection to our install time is going to be very short. So we're going to feel it very quickly, and we'll scale up for it very quickly, unlike multifamily, right? Because the bid and book time on a project to when we actually do the install can be 12 to 18 months, right? So, this single-family inflection on entry-level production builder side can be pretty meaningful. It will be meaningful when it happens. We just don't know when it's going to happen.