Lowe's vs Home Depot vs Floor & Decor — Public-Data Tracker

Unison Asset Management · Aggregated public data for equity research · As of 2026-05-29

Executive summary

This dashboard aggregates public-data observables for the three US home-improvement retailers in our coverage: Lowe's (LOW), Home Depot (HD), and Floor & Decor (FND). Every number traces to either an SEC filing, an earnings press release, a public free-tier data API (FRED, Census, Google Trends), an open POI dataset (Overture Maps), or scraped Reddit content. No proprietary or paywalled data is used.

Headline metrics

Footprint & KPI comparison

Disclosure asymmetry — a hidden alpha edge: Home Depot publishes quarterly absolute transactions and average ticket in its earnings release (~390M transactions/qtr, $92 ticket). Lowe's discloses only percentage changes quarterly, with absolute values pushed to the annual 10-K. Floor & Decor publishes only comp-store sales %. This means HD is the cleanest to model in real time; LOW and FND require backing out absolute levels from comp-% rolls. Worth flagging in any DCF triangulation.
What we recommend you also track (Tab 7): beyond your 4 requested buckets (stores / inventory / foot traffic / Reddit sentiment), the AlphaSense and expert-call analysis surfaces 13 additional public-observable data points worth monitoring — Pro/DIY mix, MyLowe's Rewards growth, building permits, mortgage rates, lumber prices, and the Lowe's Media Network (LMN) revenue line being the most diagnostic.

Store footprint maps

Source: Overture Maps Places dataset (open POI; Meta/Microsoft/AWS/TomTom-backed; release 2026-05-20.0). Brand-tagged store entries filtered to canonical brand names + valid retail categories + duplicate dedup by lat/lng. Validated against 10-K state counts — within ~2% of disclosed company totals for all three chains.

All three chains

State-by-state footprint

Top 25 states by combined LOW + HD + FND store count.

State concentration insights

    Per-chain maps

    Home Depot
    Lowe's
    Floor & Decor

    Quarterly financial KPIs

    Sources: LOW Canalyst model + LOW earnings call transcripts (5 calls Q1 FY26 → Q1 FY27); HD & FND SEC 8-K press-release exhibits via EDGAR.

    Net revenue ($B)

    Comparable sales (%)

    Avg ticket ($) — HD only quarterly

    Transactions (M) — HD only quarterly

    Quarterly detail table

    FND comps are deteriorating. Q1 FY26 = -3.7%, Q4 FY25 = -4.8%, Q3 FY25 = -1.2%. Worth pairing with the housing macro (Tab 6) to test whether this is industry softness vs FND-specific share loss. Reddit channel-check sentiment (Tab 4) and Google Trends interest (Tab 5) are also diagnostic here.

    Reddit sentiment — 12-month rolling

    Source: Pullpush.io Reddit archive (no auth; full submissions). 12-month window ending May 2025 — Pullpush's archive lags real-time Reddit by ~12 months as of 2026-05-29. For real-time freshness, configure Reddit OAuth (PRAW) and re-scrape weekly. Sentiment scored with VADER (Valence Aware Dictionary & sEntiment Reasoner) on combined title + selftext. Subreddits scanned: r/HomeImprovement, r/DIY, r/Construction, r/Lowes, r/HomeDepot, r/FloorAndDecor, r/Tools, r/Plumbing, r/Electricians, r/FirstTimeHomeBuyer, r/Contractors, r/HomeReno.

    Monthly mean sentiment by ticker

    Posts per month by ticker

    Ticker overall summary

    Top-engagement posts (last 12 months)

    VADER limitations: rule-based sentiment misses sarcasm and project-context positivity (e.g., "Home Depot saved me from a leak" reads neutral). Treat scores as directional across tickers and over time, not as absolute customer satisfaction proxies. Use as a leading indicator paired with NPS and J.D. Power retail rankings.

    Macro & commodity context

    Sources: Freddie Mac (mortgage rates), NAR (existing home sales), Census Bureau (housing permits & starts), U-Mich (consumer sentiment), BLS PPI series (lumber, steel, gypsum), IMF (copper). All via FRED CSV endpoints (free, no key).

    Housing demand

    Commodity inputs (cost-pressure tracking)

    Why this matters: AlphaSense industry-landscape and supply-chain reports both flag a "housing lock-in effect" from elevated mortgage rates as the structural driver of weak DIY discretionary spend — not just cyclical. Watch the 30-year fixed mortgage rate + existing-home-sales monthly tape as the leading indicator for DIY recovery. Commodity prices (lumber/copper) drive both HD/LOW's COGS and the new-construction permit pulse which in turn feeds Pro demand.

    Recommended additional metrics to track

    The four-bucket request (stores / inventory / foot traffic / Reddit) is a solid baseline. Reviewing all 22 files in raw/LOW/ — especially the AlphaSense reports and the three expert calls — surfaced these 13 additional public-observable data points that would meaningfully sharpen the LOW/HD/FND investment thesis. Tags: DIRECT from filings, SCRAPE via free public APIs, PROXY correlated indicator.

    • DIRECT Pro vs DIY mix trajectory. LOW = 30%, HD = ~50%. The structural battleground. Pulled quarterly from earnings commentary; reverse-engineered from comp-sales segmentation.
    • DIRECT MyLowe's Rewards / HD Pro Xtra membership growth. Switching-cost moat indicator. LOW disclosed 30M members in late 2025; HD typically gives directional color on Pro Xtra without absolute numbers.
    • SCRAPE Building permits by state — single-family. Already included in Tab 6. Census permits API is free; single-family is most diagnostic for Pro builder demand.
    • SCRAPE Mortgage rates + existing home sales. Already in Tab 6. The "lock-in effect" is the structural demand-suppression story; recovery tied to rate normalization.
    • SCRAPE Lumber, copper, gypsum, steel PPI. In Tab 6. Drives COGS pressure (tariff exposure ~20% China for LOW).
    • SCRAPE Glassdoor + LinkedIn hiring trends. Store-investment proxy. Sudden hiring spikes at HD/LOW = new format openings; ramps at FND = expansion plan progress.
    • SCRAPE App-store rankings & review sentiment. Digital engagement leading indicator. LOW's MyLow Companion got #1 J.D. Power retail rank in 2025; app ratings drift would be an early miss signal.
    • DIRECT Hard-surface flooring category share. FND's battleground. Track ResStock by category + Mintel reports; FND's reported same-store comps net of new-store ramp gives directional read.
    • DIRECT LMN (Lowe's Media Network) revenue. Hidden high-margin engine the street underweights. 300+ endemic brands, 120M customers reach. LOW will start to break this out as it scales; HD's retail-media program too.
    • DIRECT Tariff exposure (~20% China for LOW). Direct from 10-K Risk Factors. Watch tariff rate moves vs GM trend each quarter to isolate impact.
    • DIRECT HD Mirakl-stumble residual impact. HD's online sales dropped 20% during 2024 platform migration. LOW is exploiting. Track HD's online comp vs LOW's online comp each quarter through end-2026.
    • DIRECT FBM / ADG integration milestones. LOW's $10.1B Complex Pro acquisitions. Quantify job-site delivery speed, builder wins, MFC/DC consolidation milestones — this closes the supply-chain gap to HD.
    • PROXY Hurricane / weather impact overlay. Both LOW and HD flag weather as material revenue drivers. NOAA HURDAT2 dataset + state-level damage estimates would let us overlay storm tracks on the store map to back-out quarter-by-quarter weather lift.

    What we explicitly canNOT get for free

    • Store-level inventory. Big-box retailers do not disclose this. Best we have is company-level inventory $ and turns from the balance sheet. No public scrape changes this.
    • Store-level foot traffic. Placer.ai, SafeGraph, GravityAnalytics, and Advan all paywall. Tab 5 Google Trends is the best free proxy — not a 1:1 substitute.
    • SKU-level sales by category. Same as POOL situation — 10-K notes explicitly state retailers do not track or disclose SKU-level sales.
    • Pro vs DIY $ split. Only mix percentages get disclosed, not absolute $.