On a national level, Repair Order (RO) activity continues to recover (see Figure 1). The forecast for national RO in our last issue was -15%, proving to be accurate. We don’t expect to be this accurate every week but we’ll enjoy it this week.

While our overall US forecast was right on the money we were far less accurate in our market-specific forecasts. Boston recovered more quickly than we expected jumping from -30% to -9%. Miami reversed course from a stronger recovery at -4% and dropped down to -16%. These were our most extreme misses. We did hit the mark in Chicago and Los Angeles and missed by only 1% in Dallas and New York. Overall, forecast error, as measured by Mean Absolute Deviation (MAD), was 5.7%. All actuals and forecasts for last week along with new forecasts are displayed below in Figure 3.