The start of this year has begun with the industry asking a lot of questions of itself. Will it be a good year? Will the UK economy behave itself? Will demand for new windows and doors fall? Most could generally sense the mood, but to try and get a snapshot of the industry’s sentiments, I held a series of polls. The first to reach 100 votes and be closed was the installers poll.
The question:
Installers: based on the early performance of the fenestration industry, economy, markets and media coverage, how optimistic do you feel about the window and door market in 2016?
Here are the results from that particular poll:
Very optimistic – business will be booming and be much better than 2015: 17%
Reasonably optimistic – we’ll do OK, a bit better than 2015, but nothing record breaking: 39%
Flat – our industry will neither do worse or better than 2015: 20%
A bit pessimistic – there are signs that the recovery is slowing and it might affect how we perform this year: 12%
Very pessimistic – there are clearly big problem emerging on many fronts and 2016 will be a very challenging year: 12%
Analysis
You can look at these results in a couple of different ways. You could look at the results and say that the largest portion of the vote went to the “reasonably optimistic” camp with a clear 19% between that and second place. This sounds very positive on the face of it.
But if you cast your minds back to the 2015 General Election, the Tories won an overall majority with just 37% of the vote. I don’t remember many people saying that was a landslide result. In fact their portion of results represents just over a third of the nation. Not a compelling argument for saying that the results were representative. And that’s how you could look at these results above. 39% doesn’t really represent the feelings of the installers in the industry right now.
There were a few that said business was expected to be booming this year and trounce 2015. A bit optimistic if you ask me but I’m always happy to be proved wrong on that front. Then there were the installers who said business was expected to be flat, a bit pessimistic or very pessimistic this year. Together they provided 44% of the total votes. A not-to-be-sniffed-at proportion.
For me, these votes tell me that installers are perhaps trying to convince themselves that 2016 is going to be a good year, and hoping their positive statements are proved true by the time we come to the end of the year. There is an urge to be positive, in the hopes that it breeds results. In the end, cold hard economics will decide whether the positive sentiment was misguided. If it is of any interest, if I could have voted I would have sat on the fence and said that I would expect 2016 to be a flat year.
This was just the poll for installers. There are currently polls live for fabricators and syscos to send their feedback. I shall close these too at 100 votes and see what results each of those bring. It will be interesting to see if there is any correlation between those and that of the results from the installer poll.
Out of interest, at the end of last year I ran a poll, not separated in any way, asking if they thought 2016 would be better than 2015. That poll returned 44% saying that it would be better.
