All right. We'll jump right into it, given we're a couple minutes late here. Very happy to have Barry Logan from Watsco. What's your title now? It's like Grand Poobah of Watsco or something like that?
Executive Vice President.
All right.
Something abstract and generic like that. After 30 years. Yeah.
Executive Vice President of Watsco. Pat Baumann, who does the distributors here at JP Morgan. We're gonna kinda tag team here a little bit, I'll kick it to Pat, and we'll start off. Unless you wanted to give a little preamble.
No. Let's get going.
All right.
I'll preamble throughout. I wanna make the formal informal and the, and the formal informal. That's what I'm gonna do.
All right. Still trying to figure that one out, but I'll kick it over to Pat.
Morning, Barry.
Morning.
How are you?
Good.
Yeah, I mean, we sat down for dinner last night, so maybe we'll touch on some of those topics. I guess, first off, from a demand perspective, just 'cause that is a topic, obviously, AHRI, unit data down, I think, close to 20% in January. I know it's one month. It's like not a very important seasonal month. Curious if you could provide some perspective on kind of how you're thinking about, you know, trends developing through the year, starting with this quarter, for Watsco and, what you're seeing from a kind of... How we should read that sell-in data
Sure.
that we see from AHRI, from an industry perspective?
No, I think that's a critical phrase, the sell-in data versus, as a distributor, us selling to contractors who actually are doing the work in the homes and actually drawing product from us kind of on a real-time basis, versus in the distribution channel, us navigating the inventory transitions and kind of big movement going on with product. At the level set, what that kind of means in less than two or three minutes is, you know, in distribution, if we're a $7 billion business carrying $1.5 billion worth of inventory to support that level of activity, we do so in almost 700 stores, 19 million sq ft, 20,000 SKUs on average per store...
I only say all that for the dramatic purpose of now saying half of those products transitioned and are transitioning over the last 90 days to new products because of a government mandate to raise energy standards. Many of the OEMs redesigned and then we needed to convert our inventory to new products or at least new efficiencies that would satisfy the government requirement, and most importantly, have fund this year in 2023 selling a higher mix of products as a result. I would say the last 60 to 90 days is, I said in an earlier meeting, kind of the exclamation mark on what's been the most kind of tumultuous kind of channel activity between us and manufacturers, between distribution and manufacturers of our careers.
Exclamation mark is now all these new products coming in. I'm not sure there's a great ability to surmise what that means for the OEMs if they're down or up this time of year. It's not business as usual. It's not normal conditions. It's not, you know, a return to normal. It's been the most kind of outrageous product transition you can imagine over the last two or three months. Time will tell. Things will kind of either flatten out or at least pan out in a way to give you a better indication. What we worry more about, obviously, is our sales to our customers. As I said, we said in the first quarter, I mean, in the year-end, year-end call, you know, we saw it.
We've been seeing dollar growth, not unit growth. This is the smallest time of the year. We're also up against, you know, 30% comps from last year in the first quarter. To have dollar growth, given the comp, we're actually pretty satisfied with that. Again, those things kinda flatten out. Those things kind of neutralize as we get into the season. If we're gonna start the year with some growth against very strong comps, I think it speaks a measure of confidence that we have for growth this year.
Most of the OEMs are calling for kinda down mid-single-digit units for the year. Do you think that's a reasonable assumption? Like, what are you guys thinking?
Yeah. I wish I had more insight into the season 'cause that's when, you know, our business grows 30% seasonally in May, June, July and August. I don't have as much insight in February and March as I would like relative to that, honestly. If that's the assumption, I think part of that assumption is inventories that are in the channel that have been built either through the product transition or because of longer lead times, to the extent either lead times begin to lessen, honestly. That would affect our inventory, the amount of inventory we carry. I think this year could be a little bit of a year of transition for the OEMs because of the lead time situation. I'm not sure the end market will reflect the same.
I wouldn't make the same assumption at the end market level, at the contractor level. Part of that is the commercial market, light commercial market, we expect to be up, you know, certainly somewhere around 20% this year, if I had to throw out a number. It's been 20% growth in the commercial market for the last seven or eight quarters for us. We're investing in that inventory as well. The backlogs are extraordinary. Again, there are more moving pieces than just residential units. There's price, there's mix, there's commercial, our own initiatives to grow share, our own initiatives to add products and brands and capacity to our network is going on. I think, you know, I think it's probably safe what they're saying.
I'm not sure anyone really knows what to say until we get into the season. Things kind of get tested with a little bit calmer waters than all of us have had over the last two or three years.
What are you doing strategically with your inventory right now? I mean, obviously, there's, you know, some shortages in some of the key products, like Rheem had trouble delivering. York had trouble delivering, although they're not a big supplier of yours. Where do you expect to be positioned coming out of 1 Q when it comes to inventory?
Yeah. The idea is obviously, to be, have all our stores filled with the products that are the new products for the season and hedge long on inventory, given that this has been a huge transition for the manufacturers to catch up to over the last, again, three or four months. I think if anything, we will be long on inventory as we enter the season on purpose. That's to protect our growth and to protect our service levels, to protect our customer availability and then sort out again, either how calm or not calm the waters are in the fall in terms of inventory levels, you know, as we end the year.
I can speak for us that, our idea is to serve customers and to build that inventory to serve customers. To the extent we are either nervous or want to be competitive with inventory, we will build inventory as we head into the season.
If a hundred is, you know, operating where you would expect, you know, where was Rheem in the fourth quarter? Where are they now?
I don't like to make real commentary, you know, specific to them. You know, I would say that as a collection of OEMs, everyone was operating around 80% last summer, 90% as we closed the year, and still playing catch up in some respects, depending on which manufacturer. You know, Rheem in particular, and Carrier in particular, decided to basically redesign their product lines as part of this transition. It is new product. It is new features and benefits. It is a new look and feel. The conformity was not just tweaking a few things. It was, it was bringing a new product in. Despite the short-term feel of that, the long term, it's a terrific, opportunity to sell product.
We would rather sell refreshed products than tweaked old products.
Sorry, one more from me.
Yep. No, no. Go ahead.
Lead times on commercial. I mean, they were out 52 weeks, which is, as the distributors were saying, it's kind of a, it's a fake lead time. I mean, it doesn't even really qualify as a lead time.
Yeah.
Where are those now on the commercial side?
Yeah. It's a similar story where we're not worried about lead times as much as making a promise to a customer of when product will come, and that's gotten better over time. I think both commercial backlog and lead times are still relatively extreme. I don't know if it's 52 weeks or not, but it's not 90 days as may be typical for commercial products. I think everyone's in that boat together. I think it's now, you know, what we like is now we can manage customer expectations much better, and the backlog will play out over the next 12 months. Again, a year from now, I would expect, you know, kind of better availability.
The demand on light commercial, is that, how does that now split between new and replacement?
Mm-hmm.
Obviously, warehouses, data centers, you know, represent a new almost, you know, slice of the pie chart over the last five to six years, relatively, you know, from a new perspective. Is new now more important than replacement used to be to that market or not?
Well, I think it, for us, as the kind of in-the-channel distributor with inventory deployed in the field, we lean more towards the replacement market anyways. That's kind of our business model. If, if Home Depot is gonna build a new store with 10 rooftops two years from now, we may not even be involved in that equation. It could be a commercial applied job or so it could be some kind of other sales channel than us. We really focus on the aftermarket, and I would say disproportionately larger than our competitors in the aftermarket for commercial. That's someone's CapEx. That's someone that deferred a renovation, deferred an upgrade, deferred something, and now that project is playing out.
It could be a school system, could be a bank branch, could be a small profile building. It could be VRF where we sell VRF products into that channel. There's almost not a product group, and I think most of it is driven by an aftermarket need as opposed to whether they're. You know, we're not involved in building a new airport or building a new school or building a new university. That's not us. When we say commercial, it's the small profile building where the contractor is finally getting to that project or the project or owner is finally getting to do the work after maybe putting it off for a couple of years.
New build or new construction or new commercial would be disproportionately smaller for us versus some of the more direct integrated channels like a JCI or even like Carrier or Trane.
Sorry, one more on market. HARDI was up, like mid-single digits on a revenue basis. Is that kind of the right trend line from a revenue growth perspective for the first quarter that you're seeing?
Yeah, I would say there's consistency there. That's what we saw in the fourth quarter. It's what we commented in our, in our February call about what we were seeing. Again, relatively consistent.
That's double-digit, still double-digit price year-over-year?
Yeah, I would say it's not probably quite double digit, but, you know, I don't think, I don't think it's that strong. We'll tell you in a month.
Down mid-single, low-to-mid singles in volume sell through, if you will?
That's probably fair.
Okay. Sorry.
No, that's good. I mean, it will go to price.
I mean, very similar to what we saw in the fourth quarter. First, it's the off-season.
Yep.
Again, extreme comps versus a year ago. The first quarter is even a bit more of a no man's land. It's not cooling season anymore. It's not the heating season either. It's kind of a spending season, if you will. Again, to the extent there's revenue growth versus the 25% comparisons, it's.
Right.
We're satisfied with that.
Similar mix, because you guys had some nice parts and, you know, there's parts moving around. There was, you know, the ductless stuff growing, like similar profile?
Yes.
Yeah.
Very consistent.
Okay.
On pricing, maybe we could just talk about that a little bit. The OEMs all put through March first increases, but there's all this noise in the channel around certain manufacturers discounting more, being more aggressive to go for share. Can you help kind of parse all that?
Sure.
Tell us what you're seeing.
Well, again, the bread and butter contractor, the average, you know, average customer that is hustling in the market, the pricing has actually been very, very accepted in the market because they're also getting service, they're getting products, they're getting everything else for it. As [inaudible] of OEMs, the pricing timing as well as the amount has been pretty consistent. Where the scrum can occur, the fight can occur, the aggressiveness can occur is large accounts, national accounts, builders. Kind of volume players that ask for a better price all day long. If a promise is given for a better price, perhaps more volume follows. I said this last time, I called it the age of the empire. That's not the daily grind, that's on the fringe, on the margin, as opposed to how well a guy with three trucks is being serviced in Hollywood for the [inaudible] selling our product.
That guy is not demanding the last dollar, "he is demanding great service" all day today. Then again I'm going back to Home Depot. Home Depot is going to replace a thousands of systems this year, they want the best price imagineable. That's not where we fight that battle, again the manufacturers tend to fight with each other on those types of categories. It doesn't mean we ignore but it means, I can tell you, I think our yield on a 6% price increase will be better than average because of the types of customers and segments that we focus on.
What were the increases forth in March? Was it high single digit?
I'm sorry.
What were the increases that were put forth? It was about high single digits that the OEMs were putting through in March?
No, 6%.
It was six. Okay.
Yeah. 6% has kind of been the generic number. Again, it's the variations by product group, or customer type, but the composite was around 6%.
Last year, the price in Resi, I think on an ASP basis, was low teens maybe for Watsco?
Correct.
How are you thinking about how that might trend this year? Can you parse out like the mix impact from the transition versus, you know, just like-for-like, price growth that you might see?
Well, again, a lot of moving pieces there, to break it down, maybe two or three. First, I mentioned half our products are transitioning to a higher SEER level by mandate. Half our products, that's just a mix change that's selling something more expensive every day at the baseline of what we sell. The manufacturers talked last year about yielding a 10%-15% price requirement on those new products, assuming that their cost was going up 10%-15% to make them. I think that's held pretty true. If I say 10% to go to the bottom of end of the range, that 10% mix benefit occurs mostly this year, in the Sun Belt entirely this year. Northern part of the country, it's a transition in.
The industry and us will see a mix benefit by simply showing up and having a higher efficiency product as a baseline. There's inflationary type price increases since then, is March 1st. I don't know what inflationary forces the OEMs will face for the rest of the year, but we like the idea of a price increase early to be effective this season and plays into some of the calculus for this year's price support. The other third thing would be the commercial market. If commercial market is growing at a faster rate, obviously those are higher price points.
I'll suggest also that in the concept of tough inventory and low availability and high demand, I'll say that, you know, we can expect, I think, to yield a better margin out of our commercial business this year. We should be merchants with our inventory, and we intend to be. There's some margin benefit and average price benefit as well in the commercial market, not just higher volumes. I think also, there's been an absence of higher SEER product in the industry the last two years. Variable speed, high SEER, you know, kind of the high end of the market. There's been an absence of those products because of availability. That's where the chips are. That's where the variable speed inverter products are.
I think the OEMs as a community missed sales of those products over the last two years. There's an average selling price benefit. I don't know what it will be until I know fully what those products will look like in the field. It has to be more than 0 benefit because the last few years have been greatly affected by not having those products. I think the industry, you know, can accept more pricing. It has. I think the manufacturers are. They can tell you, but I think they still face a lot of inflationary risk and forces. To the extent, you know, the market can accept increases, so far so good. We're seeing that already this year.
We're not seeing pressure on margin as we start the year.
Anything else on pricing?
Yeah. I mean, I guess is there zero elasticity in this market?
Yeah. I think again, if Well, two things that help. There's no such thing as no elasticity. I think first, in the value chain, if you will, if we buy a system from our OEM for $2,000 or $3,000 and sell it for $3,000 or $4,000, the contractor's installing it for $7,000 or $8,000. My 10% price increase I receive from Carrier, or Rheem or Mitsubishi becomes just a component of the value chain for what it costs the consumer to get the product. Either it's invisible or not as material, or the contractor can have the flexibility to move his price to get the job done. There's If there wasn't value beyond us in the channel, I think there would be risk.
There's a lot of value beyond us in the channel with profitability at the contractor level that's very material, and provides a bit of a cushion. Secondly, maybe thankfully, air conditioning and heating only gets replaced every 10 or 15 years. It's not a commodity. It's not a loaf of bread or, or a dozen eggs. It's you buy once in your, in your home's lifetime. I think that. You have to have it. You must have it when it breaks. So it's always been, I think, a good industry from that perspective. I wouldn't say there's ever zero elasticity that, you know, we can't charge, you know, $50,000 for these things. We can charge 8% more if that's the direction of what's being pulled through the channel, across the value chains.
Well, I guess we'll see, in the next 18 months.
Time tells all, right? We'll be smarter then, that's for sure.
I don't know about it that way.
You know, but 30 years of it and seeing what's interesting about, you know, let's say 30 years of experience, every five or six years, there's been some catalyst to help our industry not become a commodity. It's either refrigerant changes, it's energy efficiency changes, it's tax credits. It's something to provoke upgrade or provoke higher efficiency, which costs more to produce and install. Over the next two or three years, there's three things happening in that respect. Maybe it will test what a consumer will pay for these things, but I'm certain that people will live without it and people will take the contractor's advice because they can't do it on their own. To an extent, it's something that will have to be dealt with as a consumer.
Isn't the commodity, though, just cold air, like, ultimately?
Yeah, it's comfort. It's obviously, you know, what is comfort worth in your home? You know, what is that worth? What would you trade for it? Would you trade it for new kitchen cabinets? Would you rather have new kitchen cabinets or for $10,000 or more comfortable, you know, heat pump air conditioning system for $10,000? I'll take the trade of our industry versus, you know, The Home Depot selling kitchen cabinets.
Cold day. My family has a few more expense items in the pipe chart than kitchen cabinets and air conditioning, unfortunately, but.
Yeah. What's interesting is, you know, a car costs $40 grand, and we don't mind replacing that every four or five years, right? Part of what allows us to do that is the financing vehicle, the financing, you know, capacity to go do that every four or five years. We don't wring our hands having to spend $40 grand on a car because we know we can lease it for, you know, $410 a month. Our industry has been somewhat, you know, dinosaur-like in providing financing to homeowners and contractors who have to deliver that financing. We are doing a lot of things with technology to evolve that.
That will be a holy grail if we solve it, is to have every transaction a consumer sees in their home have that same financing, elegance and capacity for every transaction. That's, that's another one-hour session, we can schedule with anybody that wants to hear what we're up to. We're doing in-home selling, in-home financing, in-home data streams, in-home, elegant proposal tools for our contractors. To evolve that and, you know, provide, again, the capability of doing this, on scale where our competitors really can't. Maybe, maybe that's another solution, is to bring, you know, a financing capacity that doesn't exist today on scale.
You would say that about, I don't know, the feedback I get is about 30% of the industry is financed in some way, shape, or form right now?
Yeah, 30% is financed, but it's because it's 95% of that 30% is within a very select group of mega contractors who qualify under very specific criteria from
Right.
Wells Fargo, Citicorp. It's like the most elite elite contractors get access to that product. What we're doing is bringing technology to democratize that to any contractor with an iPad that can go in and present something to a homeowner, and fintech sitting behind that, not us, but partners sitting behind us to provide a cascade of financing to any contractor for most homeowners that qualify. If it has to be the way the furniture guys do it or the way, you know, other industries do this, you know, how do you go to a furniture store, buy $10,000 of furniture and not pay for it for two years? It's because software exists in every single retailer to do that with fintech behind it supporting it. Our industry doesn't have that.
We're working on that project, and we have some inventions that are done and tested. Now we need to spread the religion with contractors to go do it. I think it could relieve some of the stress over how am I gonna pay for a $12,000 new system that I have to have.
Right.
Maybe switching gears and on profitability, talk about gross margins a little bit, which is always topical, but more so than ever, because of how much they've improved the last 2 years. Maybe talk about why you've gone from kind of, what was previously, like 25% type of entitlement to 27% now, and why you think that's sustainable.
Sure. Well, gross profit first and over our careers is let's do everything we can to increase it every year. If that's value to our customer, or if that's better negotiation with manufacturers, if that's let's have better data about pricing itself in the market. Typically and historically, that was very federated, again, in a sales force that we give commissions to and regional managers that we rely on their intuition in markets to determine and set price. It's snowflakes. If we have 90,000 customers that we sell 20,000 products to, you know, per branch, the mix profile, the price profile, the customer profiles were snowflakes. Literally extrapolate that may be how many different pricing scenarios we had in place for our customers historically. I'll make it even worse.
We also buy from our OEMs and manufacturers at different prices, depending on the market, depending on the customer type, depending on, you know. It has to be, you know, we're not the airlines and we're not, you know, pharmaceutical, but we have to have one of the most, you know, complex pricing models of any industry, and in our case, as a distributor, because we let salespeople, for the most part, determine what was best to how to set margins in their markets. I've said a few things there that I'll synthesize into two points, which is improving margin with our manufacturing partners was a big priority a few years ago because we didn't know what would happen during the pandemic. We didn't know how it would play out.
What we thought was if we invest and grow and throw technology dollars and train our customers and gain adoption and kinda change the game quicker, we're gonna grow our business no matter what happens during the pandemic. We're talking about ramping up technology spending from $25 million, $30 million to $50 million over the last two years and going to an OEM community and saying, "You're part of this. You need to help us." Going to our OEM community and saying, "For us to grow, we need to add people, we need to add inventory, we need to add cost. You need to improve our margin equation to allow for that. It's a two-way street, not a one-way street." Our partners did that. We've raised margins with most of our top 10 vendors.
We've made investments in SG&A for new people and branches. We've grown share 200 basis points. We've added technology. We've added users. Everything has played out and people have done pretty well. Our OEMs have done well, and we've done well. That's structural. That's not something we intend to unwind, and we're not being asked to renegotiate that. It's a, it's a good feeling to, for it to have worked, and now we're asking for more, frankly, not less, 'cause we think the market share game will be even more important over the next 2 or 3 years. The other thing I mentioned about snowflakes is technology. Over the last 2 years, we introduced a layer of technology that extracts pricing and margin customer data out of our ERP.
We are able to synthesize that into a much better, data, you know, data integrity and knowledge about pricing and margin, make quicker decisions, have really, frankly, Bloomberg-style data to look at quickly and make decisions. Two or three years ago, we'd print a P&L, let a branch manager see it once a month and try to make either pricing or margin decisions off of a monthly close. That sounds ridiculous. Fortunately, again, to make matters worse, we had 600 vendors with unprecedented levels of pricing actions over the last two and a half years. I think the technology was terrific to have in place to administrate that and to optimize that.
If 3M, you know, raised the price of duct tape 5x , I'm certain we're not just selling duct tape at a higher price. We've optimized margin in ways that have helped our bottom line. Again, customers, if they're being properly served, you know, that margin will be yielded in our customer network. What we, the negative, which was a variable that helped us, I mentioned this last night, was to the extent there are inflationary price increases going on in the past two years, that helped our margin. To the extent there isn't going forward, it affects our margin going forward.
That's just one of the, one of the algebra factors of being in distribution, Fastenal, Pool, all of us have either the honeymoon benefit or the honeymoon risk of that. I think what we saw this year as we're getting into a normal zone of price increase once a year, there's probably some exposure this year. We've said that. We've categorized that when we talked about a 27% target. It accounts for that risk. The last six months, so far so good. Last six months, there really haven't been many pricing actions by OEMs or manufacturers, other kinds of manufacturers. Margins have held, you know, given what I've said. Culturally is the intangible. Culturally, if everyone is used to this, then everyone's going to seek this and more.
That's a customer level, that's a salesman level again. We still see acquisition candidates with margins higher than ours. I should say that, I think that would surprise you. There are merchants out there in this industry that are north of where we are. I think there's plenty, there's still opportunity to improve what we do.
Maybe on that front, on the M&A front. Can you talk about, you know, the pipeline there, and more so I guess I'm interested in, it just seems like there's activity outside of Watsco that's kind of increased of late, whether it's Daikin buying their distribution, or there was a European distributor that bought a company called Heritage, over the last few months. Just more activity, it seems like. Maybe not, but to me, it seems like there has been.
Yeah, a bit more. Yeah, again, just the landscape. If the industry is around $50 billion, round number, I would say $40 billion of that, $40 something billion of that is independent distribution. The OEM distribution community that distributes its own product, I would guess is, I don't know, $6 billion-$7 billion, something like that. That's Lennox, Trane, Goodman, JCI to an extent. The rest is 1,300 independents. We're the largest of the 1,300 at $7 billion. People like Ferguson would be probably a $3 billion player in our markets. They have bought companies in our industry through the years. We don't have to, you know, the Warren Buffett sermon, we don't have to, you know, swing at every pitch just because something is for sale.
Our choosiness will be people that wanna do business with us. We've never hired a banker, never hired a broker, never paid a fee. If someone wants to conduct an auction, we're kind of, I want the last dollar and wanna retire on their way out and leave the keys on the desk, that's probably not for us at any price, honestly. To the extent private equity wants to do that or a competitor wants to do that's a risk that they can take. We'll talk to them in a 4 or 5 years and say, "Are you interested in selling it to us?" After having taken that risk for those 4 or 5 years. We're choosy about it. At the same time, there's no lack of candidates.
There's a 100 companies that do $100 million or more in our industry. These are local superpowers that control brands, control markets, have exclusivities that no one else has. We bought the largest in Chicago two years ago. We bought the largest in the Philadelphia market three years ago. They've doubled their profitability over the last 2 years. The families that sold them to us are all still there advocating to other families that we're talking to. That's where our success has been, is getting this kind of community of families that have known each other for a long time to work with us and do this with us.
Where Daikin, for example, decided to buy a few of its independent distributors, we certainly knew those families too, and in some cases, the family said, "We're done. This is yours now." It's somewhat either defensive on their part or just long-term protective on their part. That's their prerogative as the manufacturer to protect their distribution. It tells us what the value of what they believe their distribution is if they are worried enough to buy it. It tells you the value of distribution in that respect. That's happened before. It will happen again. We've been growing, you know, for 30 years this way and we'll keep growing this way. It's been very disciplined, and we're not too surprised.
We're surprised at some of the valuation, you know, when you want in the market, then maybe you have to pay what it takes to get in the market. nothing that is scaling, you know, to a point where it looks like Watsco. We're still more than twice the size of our next competitor.
Any questions out there?
Yesterday, Johnson Controls was talking about digitalization within their products and how they can use that to fix cadence and how they can take more service revenue there. Does that have any impact on your business at all?
Sure. The question for the webcast is, JCI mentioned about digitization and some of the, you know, next technology maybe in the market and how that influences thing. Well, first, in the commercial market, I think that's table stakes ultimately, is having a system in this building speaking to its facility manager at some computer screen that's managing every nuance of what's going on. Commercial market has been, I think, maturing that technology over time. The OEMs that do that stuff against each other are competing at that level. That doesn't affect us really at all. We only have that product in maybe two markets, and it's a long-term space race probably in that community of OEMs.
Our focus in a different way, but with the same intent, is how do we bring our contractor closer to the homeowner every day, given that, you know, there's a value that is available to that. We call it Sticker 2.0, for example. It's a ridiculous fun statement. Sticker 1.0 is I'll put a sticker when I'm working on your machine. You'll call my company to come service it again 'cause I put the sticker there. That was the technology. As a distributor, we would help them design the stickers, by the way. As a distributor, we used to help contractors design Yellow Page ads. That was, like, part of our value. Sticker 2.0 is something that our team invented.
We bought a small company in Waterloo, Canada, in their, in their Silicon Valley in Canada to help us bring it to life. It's the sensors that can be added to any installed system at the residential level, any brand, any system, 10 minutes to install and begin to monitor that system for any kind of anomalies or issues. Then the contractor's advised when there's an issue going on, and they can call the homeowner and say, "I'm seeing this. Would you mind if I come by?" Or a service and maintenance contract that connects the home to the contractor, and they can diagnose and see an issue maybe before it happens or while it's happening. I don't have to compete with JCI, Carrier, and Trane doing that in this building.
What we want is a contractor that has 500 homes in Miami as customers connected to his business and help him with a lifetime value of that, of that relationship at a reasonable cost. Everything I've just said is more in startup mode than commercialized in the market. Just get the sense that we don't wanna ignore that type of technology, our application for it is a little bit different and something we're working on to get beyond just selling a box at a margin, and is it gonna go up or down, and will we be good at this in negotiations? Will it be cyclical or not cyclical?
We're actually doing things that will change the way contractors deal with homeowners and what's an $80 billion-$90 billion market, well beyond just selling the, you know, a box with a brand on it. A lot going on. Again, that's another one or two-hour technology discussion. If any of you would like to have, we'll get you on with the guys wearing flip-flops while they're talking to you on Zoom, you can listen to their long-term strategy. There's a lot of good stuff going on in that respect.
Any other questions? All right. We're at time here. Thanks, Barry.
Thank you very much.
Appreciate it.
Thanks, everybody.