Home Depot is a company whose fortunes rode high during the pandemic. If people couldn't get out and about or move to a new place, they would certainly fix the old one up. Sales in fiscal years ending around the end of January went from $132.1 billion in 2021 to $151.2 billion in 2022, $157.4 billion in 2023, and then $152.7 billion in 2024.

The run on home improvement wasn't going to last forever, and neither was the need for extra warehouse space, as the Wall Street Journal recently reported. Home Depot is looking to sublease four warehouses totaling about 4.7 million square feet in space that it had been using in Monroe, New Jersey; Goodyear, Arizona; Joliet, Illinois; and Riverside, California. When supply chains were in tangles, the company had been bringing in additional inventory from Asia and it had to go somewhere.

But those days are over because the market's needs are different now. As the Journal noted, low sales of existing homes and higher interest rates have put a damper on renovations and repairs. Less need and higher costs will do that.