Michael Thaman
Analyst · Keith Hughes, SunTrust
Great. Let me first start on kind of year-to-date volumes. I mean, year-to-date, we haven't actually experienced that much volume growth versus prior year. I mean, if you remember last year, we had a pretty good first quarter, and we actually had a quite strong second quarter. So while our second quarter this year was a bit stronger than last year, I would say that year-to-date, we have not seen dramatic or double-digit type volume growth, even though we are saying on this call we think the overall market for the full year will probably be up double digits. I think our optimism here is we do think the volume we saw in the second quarter carries over, whereas last year, clearly, it didn't. And last year, I think the optimism in the market was more built off of the first-time homebuyer tax credit, a belief that the economy was recovering, that we would start to see people back investing in their homes, that home prices had stopped falling. And I think as we look back in hindsight, all of that in fact turned out to not be true. And when we got into the second half of last year, the market got kind of quiet for reroof demand, which was where the optimism last year had driven market demand, and we backed up and had a volume miss in the third quarter last year. I think this year, we're seeing specific -- and I wouldn't say isolated, because it's fairly widespread. We're seeing significant sizable metropolitan areas where there were both hailstorms, tornadoes and high-wind-type storms in the second quarter. And there's weather services that report on this. I think what was very different about the first half of this year was the size and severity of some of these hail and high windstorms, and that they happened in major metropolitan areas. So I think we all saw the devastation of places like Joplin and Tuscaloosa, those made the front cover of the paper, but we've seen lots and lots of hail damage in places like Dallas, Charlotte, Pittsburgh and others. So there's been pretty widespread metropolitan areas that have gotten hit with severe weather. And it's our best assessment of that today that, that would create storm-related demand in the industry that probably powers double-digit overall growth in industry demand this year. Obviously, we would hope to achieve at least our share of that demand growth, which, if you put that into kind of the outlook, says we end up with a sizably better third quarter in terms of volumes than what we saw last year. And that gives us some optimism for the second half of the year.