Tracy Alloway

Almost all of it is manufactured in the United States, sold in the United States, or manufactured in Canada or sold in Canada.

And we really don't have business overseas.

So the tariffs didn't really affect us.

Now, it might have affected demand destruction overall.

It might have affected how much construction was happening.

But directly, we were not clobbered by the tariffs.

The weather clobbered us a lot more than the tariffs.

What is the main commodity input for insulation?

Oh, it's chemical.

It's chemically created and it's refined in a manufacturer with a lot of people looking like chemists.

So like, is it petrochemical?

Like if like oil prices were to surge, would that be a sort of like margin crimping factor for insulation prices?

Well, I think we're better off with oil prices lower for demand, not so much for the cost of the goods, but lower oil prices, there's more confidence and more demand.

But the real factor for building products is mortgage rates.

So mortgage rates when they were seven and a half percent was really bad.

Yeah.

Because people had 3% mortgages or 3.25% mortgages, and people just have a problem paying off a 3% mortgage and taking out a 7% mortgage.

They're now down a bit, 6.5-ish percent, but they've got to come down more.

So when the Iran war finally ends, and it'll end someday, and interest rates come down, which they will under this administration, it's pretty good odds that mortgage rates will come down and business will start booming.

Yeah, this is what I wanted to ask, which is, I guess, financing availability at the moment, because clearly we are in the midst of this Iran situation and we have seen some very volatile markets out there.