After Earnings, Is Home Depot Stock a Buy, a Sell, or Fairly Valued?

Home Depot released its third-quarter earnings report on Nov. 12. Here’s Morningstar’s take on Home Depot’s earnings and stock.

Key Morningstar Metrics for Home Depot

• Fair Value Estimate: $292.00
• Morningstar Rating: 1 star
• Economic Moat: Wide
• Morningstar Uncertainty Rating: Low

What We Thought of Home Depot’s Q3 Earnings

• Another quarter of higher-than-optimal interest rates and macroeconomic uncertainty has continued to stall major renovation projects with DIY customers. This is evidenced by a 6.8% decline in big-ticket sales, worse than the 5.8% decrease last quarter.
• We remain optimistic that DIY customer demand will improve in 2025, but it may not begin to pick back up until the second half of the year, when interest rate reductions may materialize in lower mortgage rates.
• With Home Depot focused on improving the pro experience (dedicated customer service, more labor hours), we believe pro will continue to outpace DIY spending in the near term, supporting upside to our prior estimates.
• We raised our fair value estimate to $292 per share. However, we still view shares as overvalued, trading at 25 times next year’s earnings.

Fair Value Estimate for Home Depot

With its 1-star rating, we believe Home Depot’s stock is significantly overvalued compared with our long-term fair value estimate of $292 per share. The firm posted better-than-expected third-quarter revenue, which grew 6.6% to $40.2 billion, benefiting from $200 million of hurricane-related sales. Excluding weather-related performance, the pro business saw continued strong results, with SRS adding $2.9 billion in revenue, in line with expectations.

DIY consumers continue to feel pressure from high interest rates and macroeconomic uncertainty, resulting in a decline of 6.8% in big-ticket sales and comp sales down again. Low housing turnover has also weighed on DIY performance, as potential buyers wait for mortgage rates to come down, though we expect to see improvement in the housing market in the latter part of 2025 and DIY spending to normalize.

Read more about Home Depot’s fair value estimate.

Economic Moat Rating

We assign Home Depot a wide moat. As the largest global home improvement retailer, Home Depot possesses a competitive edge owing to its brand intangible asset and cost advantage. Over the past 10 years, Home Depot’s sales growth has outpaced its industry’s average growth of 5.3% by 170 basis points annually. We surmise the company’s strong brand equity and extensive scale should enable incremental market share gains in the highly fragmented $1 trillion North American home improvement market, on top of the 15% market share it has amassed thus far (given roughly $153 billion in sales in 2023).

Read more about Home Depot’s economic moat.

Financial Strength

Home Depot has had no concerns tapping the credit markets to finance the business in recent years. The firm raised $10 billion in debt during the first half of 2024 to finance part of its $18.25 billion acquisition of SRS Distribution. This should leave Home Depot with a total debt above $50 billion at the end of the second quarter. Management has halted share repurchases with higher expected debt service as a result of the pending acquisition. However, we model share repurchases to continue over the long run (with the new $15 billion share repurchase program authorized in August 2023). Including the impact of the SRS acquisition, EBIT is forecast to cover the net interest expense 10 times at the end of 2024.

Read more about Home Depot’s financial strength.

Risk and Uncertainty

We give Home Depot a Low Uncertainty Rating, owing to its strong brand recognition, which has helped stabilize sales through the cycle. Sales are largely driven by greater consumer willingness to spend on category goods, with stable existing-home price growth and decent turnover. Thanks to the maintenance, repair, and operations business, pro revenue could be less cyclical, as the maintenance side can prove more consistent. In uncertain economic times, consumers remain in their homes, embarking on improvement projects and boosting do-it-yourself revenue. Alternatively, when home prices rise, the wealth effect generates a psychological boost, reinvigorating professional sales thanks to a higher willingness to spend on big projects. A diverse consumer base helps normalize revenue even in uneven times. Currently, about half of sales are in the do-it-yourself arena, while the rest is generated from the pro customer.

Read more about Home Depot’s risk and uncertainty.

HD Bulls Say

• Home Depot’s continued investments in supply chain and merchandising should improve productivity and support its leadership in the home improvement market.
• The company has returned $73 billion to shareholders through dividends and share buybacks over the past five years, nearly 20% of its market cap. In our outlook, we forecast Home Depot to return nearly $85 billion to shareholders over the next five years.
• The addressable MRO market is around $100 billion, and Interline and HD Supply make up a low-double-digit share, leaving meaningful upside up for grabs.

HD Bears Say

• Weak consumer spending, higher interest rates, or an economic downturn could hinder sales for home improvement projects and affect Home Depot’s growth.
• IT and supply chain improvement gains could prove more challenging to achieve, as simpler efforts have already borne fruit. Further productivity efforts could face some implementation risks, creating inconsistent profitability.
• As home improvement demand continues normalizing, consumers could shift discretionary spending away from home improvements into other discretionary categories.

This article was compiled by Kayleigh Hall.