For the week of June 7, national RO was down only -5% beating our forecast (-8%) by 3%. The week of June 14 dropped back to -6%. New Covid-19 cases jumped up over 180k for the first time since April. Our forecast for next week is -4% versus 2019.

Market level forecasts were less accurate for the week of June 7. We failed to predict the strength in several markets including STL, PHI, ORL, HOU and CHI. We didn’t hit the mark this week for any single market but we missed by only 2% in DEN, DET and PHX. Forecast error as measured by mean absolute deviation (MAD) was 7.0%, our highest error rate to date. Note that we didn’t make forecasts for the week of June 14 so the following forecasts are for the week of June 21. Severe weather with heavy rain is expected this week in much of the Southeast US and then moving north along the Atlantic seaboard later in the week.