When I picked up my local newspaper the other day, a headline read “Collierville’s McGinnis Hardware to close its doors after 146 years.” Clearly this isn’t the first independent store to go out of business, but it brought on feelings of nostalgia. Started in 1866 and in the same location on the picturesque Town Square since 1879, McGinnis Hardware was a fixture in the community. It stood through the Spanish-American War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, Desert Storm and the Iraq War.

Attendees of the 2012 Home Improvement Research Institute (HIRI) Spring Conference in Arlington, Va., were promised insights and resources. And even before the last of seven speakers packed up his PowerPoint, the mission was accomplished.

For instance, Mike Fratantoni of the Mortgage Bankers Association shared that the U.S. economy seemed to be on the path to a self-sustaining recovery, an assessment he qualified with a “but” and an “and.”

There is an old curse: “May you live in interesting times.” Unfortunately for the economy, the last several years have been “interesting times.” Home improvement has weathered this storm better than some areas (notably new-home construction), but the industry has clearly been impacted. Twice a year the Home Improvement Research Institute (HIRI) publishes a detailed size-of-market forecast for home improvement product sales.

Chicago — Mixed macroeconomic signals lurked behind many of the charts displayed at the Home Improvement Research Institute’s (HIRI’s) Industry Summit last month. But presenter J. Walker Smith stressed that the fault lies in ourselves, not the economy. He pointed to several companies outside the home improvement industry that have shown amazing growth — Apple, Hyundai and Zappos, for instance. “These companies have shown unprecedented success during the third-worst downturn in U.S.

I’ve been in the home improvement industry for 25 years, and I cannot remember a time with so much divergent information on where we stand and where we are heading. 


As the latest Consumer Confidence Index scored a slight uptick (see Dashboard, page 42), the latest research from the Home Improvement Research Institute showed a boost in the expected amount of spending on projects around the home. 


The anticipated cost of planned home improvement projects in June increased 5% to an average of $517 per project, according to the latest monthly update from HIRI.


The anticipated cost of planned home improvement projects in June increased 5% to an average of $517 per project, according to the latest monthly update from the Home Improvement Research Institute (HIRI).

The spending average is the highest recorded in the month of June since tracking began in 2008. It's also the highest since the January 2011 planned-spending average of $548.

Overall, planned-project incidence increased to 49.1%, compared with 48.1% in June 2010.

The latest monthly update from the Home Improvement Research Institute shows a planned home improvement project incidence of 50.4% among consumers in April. That's up 2.8% from the year-ago month and the second month in a row of year-over-year increases.

After a sharp drop in December, the first four months of planned project incidence have been mostly up, or very slightly down compared with last year, according to HIRI's Monthly Sentiment Tracking.

The 2011 National Hardware Show kicks off May 10 In Las Vegas. Highlights of the three-day event include:

• An outdoor tailgate party making the most of the latest in tailgating products on display;

• Celebrity autographs, including football great Jack Youngblood and actor Ed Begley Jr.;

• A data dive from the Home Improvement Research Institute (HIRI) on consumer projects;

Arlington, Va. -- Key housing metrics are in for a slow ride in 2011, and a quick upturn in 2012, according to the forecast from the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA).

Delivering the MBA's forecast here at the Home Improvement Research Institute's (HIRI's) Spring Conference, Michael Fratantoni, the MBA's VP single-family research and policy development, said that along with pent-up demand for housing, "there's a lot of pent-up supply out there."

Having worked heavily with marketing research for more than 30 years, I know just how useful it can be to make better business decisions, but like all tools there are limitations. One very important issue with marketing research is that we often measure peoples’ attitudes, but what we really care about is their behavior. In some cases, there is a very close link between the two and sometime not so much. Let’s consider two examples.