HARDI partners with data aggregator to provide complete residential HVAC unitary sales reports for every major U.S. market. Participation needed, confidentiality guaranteed. What do distributors get out of the deal?

COLUMBUS, Ohio –HARDI has partnered with Better Data℠, a service of D&R International Ltd., to present the new Unitary HVAC Market Share Reports for distributors to report to and have the potential to provide market-specific unitary sales breakdowns.

“This project is the first tool that allows us to accurately benchmark sales results by region and keep the HARDI distributor in touch with dynamic changes in terms of new systems,” said Tom Roberts, cfm Distributors president and chair of HARDI’s HVAC Systems Council. “While we've had great benchmarking tools in the past, this new project allows the distributor to evaluate how effective they are at selling a product that can be more profitable for them and for their manufacturer partners.”

According to HARDI, their distributors represent 90 percent of the total wholesale sales volume of HVACR products in the U.S. Creating this report requires that HARDI distributors report total unitary sales by model number and location to Better Data℠. This data aggregator will then perform all cross-referencing to produce quarterly regional unitary sales reports.

“This is an exciting project to test a next-generation unitary sales report that couldn’t be easier for distributors to participate in while providing potentially priceless information about what kinds of equipment are actually selling and where,” said Talbot Gee, executive vice president, HARDI.

The Unitary HVAC Market Share Report is available on an annual subscription basis. Subscribers will receive four quarterly reports, plus an annual report that includes all unitary product (air-conditioners, heat pumps, furnaces, and boilers) sales on both a national and regional (based on HARDI’s seven U.S. regions) level. Subscribers can enhance their subscriptions to include custom territories (states, other).

"We have worked with a number of utility companies in the past," said Toby Swope, manager of data quality and analytics, D&R International. "They wanted to know where they should spend their money, so they enlisted us to take a look at the market. While doing our research, we encountered a number of questions regarding HVACR products, their capacities, SEER levels, the difference between ductless and ducted systems, and more. We found that this information is not widely available for the HVACR industry, so, it only made sense that we propose a study."

The goal of this new project is to provide complete residential HVAC unitary sales reports for every major U.S. market with breakdowns of sales by efficiency level, equipment type, and refrigerant type in a scalable manner capable of expansion to other attributes as deemed necessary by HARDI’s HVAC Systems & Equipment Council.

The first Unitary Market Share Report for Q1 will be released April 2013. Distributor members who sell residential equipment should begin reporting their sales now and all other HARDI members can subscribe now at a significant members-only discount.

The confidentiality of distributors’ data and identities is fully guaranteed.

To learn more about the Unitary Market Share Report, please contact Brian Loftus at bloftus@hardinet.org or Toby Swope at tswope@drintl.com.

For more information on this new project, please visit www.hardinet.org/benchmarking.