Repair Order (RO) activity in the US continues to recover, albeit at a slower pace since early May. The forecast for national RO in our last issue was -12%, which was close but off by 1% with RO activity -13% for the week of May 17 versus the same week in 2019. Meanwhile, new US Covid-19 case counts dropped below 150k for the first time in eight weeks.

Overall, our market level forecasts were slightly better than last week. Our worst miss was Orlando where we forecast 0% change but activity was down -8%. We hit the mark in Chicago and missed by only 1% in Detroit, LA, Philadelphia, Phoenix and Seattle. Overall, forecast error as measured by mean absolute deviation (MAD) was 3.1%, better than the 5.7% recorded last week. We’re including some basic weather information, just a simple outlook in terms of temperature highs and lows (℉) and likely conditions during the upcoming work week (M-F). Pretty warm temperatures across the US with Phoenix expecting 110 ℉ later in the week.