Lowe's slightly outperformed Home Depot in the domestic comparable-store sales department. Lowe's negative 1.1 percent compared to Home Depot's negative 1.2 percent.

The CEOs echoed each other's take on the retail landscape.

Home Depot's Ted Decker: "We continue to see pressure on larger remodeling projects driven by the higher interest rate environment and continued macroeconomic uncertainty."

Lowe's Marvin Ellison: "When it comes to the macro environment, this remains a challenging home improvement market. While interest rates are beginning to drop, consumers continue to face affordability challenges as both inflation and interest rates are putting pressures on their wallet. Mortgage rates also remained stubbornly high and there's still a meaningful gap between current mortgage rates to purchase a home and the homeowners existing rates with over half of current rates below 4 percent."

Full year guidance

Looking ahead to the full year results, Home Depot said it expects sales to grow about 4 percent, with a comp-store sales decline of about 2.5 percent. "We updated our guidance primarily as a result of the better performance in the third quarter as well as expected hurricane-related demand in the fourth quarter," Decker said.

At Lowe's, executives expect total sales for the full year to fall between $83 billion and $83.5 billion (previously $82.7 to $83.2 billion). Comparable sales are expected to be down 3.0 percent to 3.5 percent. A previous forecast called for comp declines between negative 3.5 percent and negative 4.0 percent.

Digital data

The Home Depot reported that sales leveraging the company's digital platforms increased 4 percent compared to the third quarter of 2023.

At Lowe's, online sales were up 6 percent. Also, online conversion and traffic both increased, including double-digit increase in traffic to the Lowe's mobile app.