From New Year’s Day to Valentine’s Day, we haven’t had this good a year in six or eight years.
There is no specificity of what kind of pools are selling — it seems to be all over the place. We’ve sold a couple super high-end pools and a couple really inexpensive ones. But the sales staff is excited and the construction people are excited, and the weather is cooperating as well. It’s warm in the Northeast. In other years, everything seemed against us, but this year it seems to be that everything is for us in terms of weather and the stock market.
Somebody said to me that maybe people who have been on the sidelines are now deciding to jump in the pool, so to speak, because the pools that are selling are mainly from older leads, not new ones. People are finally saying, “You know what? We’ve been looking too long. Let’s just do it.”
The commercial market has been reasonably good, too. All of a sudden, semi-commercial work — apartments, hotels, condo association pools — seem to be coming back slowly as well.
But I know this could be just another hiccup. We are not going out and buying a new dump truck or investing in new employees yet, simply because what has happened these past years is we have a good month and then we have three bad months. So I can’t say we assume this will continue, but it really is a positive sign.
