Home Depot shared some not-so-great news with investors this morning. It reported earnings for the last quarter that fell short of what Wall Street analysts were expecting, and it cut its forecasts for sales growth and profits for the year.

The company said it believes consumer uncertainty and the state of the housing market are “disproportionately impacting home improvement demand.”

One reason why Home Depot’s results were underwhelming is that the housing market is kind of stuck, said Jaime Katz, a senior analyst at Morningstar.

“I think once you see more people putting their homes up for sale, and more people buying homes that are put up for sale, you will, in turn, see more spend on home improvement,” Katz said.

Home Depot also blamed its results in part on a third quarter that had fewer damaging storms than expected, which meant the retailer sold less plywood, roofing materials, and generators. Though Drew Reading at Bloomberg Intelligence, said the real cloud hanging over the home improvement industry, like so many others, is consumer caution.

“When sentiment is weak, you're going to defer spending on discretionary items. And that's what really what we're hearing from the home improvement retailers and the building product manufacturers which supply them, is that consumers are taking a wait-and-see approach. They want to see how the economy shakes out. They want to see what happens with tariffs,” Reading said.

In the meantime, Reading said homeowners are foregoing big-ticket renovations to focus on maintenance, repair, and smaller projects.

“Painting a room or fixing a water heater, fixing plumbing, updating, maybe fixtures, while we're not talking about doing a full bathroom remodel, maybe we'll replace some of the plumbing, the toilet, the faucet, things like that,” Reading said.

But Home Depot’s results don’t capture the whole picture of what’s going on in the $600 billion home improvement industry, said Rachel Drew at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

“Home Depot is is serving a segment of the remodeling industry. They're generally serving homeowners who are working on do-it-yourself projects,” Drew said.

Drew said the indicators she tracks — including potential buyers coming off the sidelines and increases in permits for larger projects — still point to slow but steady growth in home improvement going forward.