Home Repair Contractors

13/05/2024Home Repair Contractors

Spending on home renovations slows, but high remodeling costs mean little relief

LOS ANGELES — Homeowners have been spending more on home renovations in recent years, as high interest rates and stubbornly high inflation drove up costs for everything from flooring to refrigerators.

The home improvement spree got particularly heated early in the pandemic, when Americans invested to make their homes better suited for remote work and learning. But the home improvement frenzy appears to be cooling.

Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies’ latest leading indicator of remodeling activity, or LIRA, suggests homeowner spending on renovations and repairs will fall to $449 billion this year. That would represent a roughly 7%

11/05/2024Home Repair Contractors

This is how much homeowners are spending to replace a roof or furnace and fix a toilet

Something you often hear about home ownership is that it’s a forced savings plan. What you never hear is that owning a home is a forced spending plan as well.

While you’re building equity by making regular mortgage payments, you’re also paying for repairs and maintenance. But how much, exactly? Home repair costs are the great unknown of home ownership.

To bring some clarity to the cost of home maintenance, I asked readers of the Carrick on Money e-mail newsletter to fill out a questionnaire about the cost of repairs they’ve done and additional details such as the size and

07/05/2024Home Repair Contractors

Key Takeaways from the 2024 Houzz Home Study

The look, pace, and cost of home renovations have been changing over the last few years. Each year, Houzz performs a study to try to keep up with these changes, helping the home improvement industry better understand the landscape. In this guide, we’ll take a quick look at some of the most significant takeaways from this year’s study, as reported by over 32,000 study respondents.

Were People Renovating in 2023?

Yes! The 2024 Houzz Home Study shows that people are still renovating, though the percentage of homeowners who performed renovations did dip slightly between 2022 and 2023. But even with

05/05/2024Home Repair Contractors

Yelp Has a New AI Bot for Home Repairs, and It’ll Quiz You on Your Needs

As online search evolves to become more conversational thanks to generative AI, review platform Yelp is riding the wave with a series of new features that allow you to pinpoint relevant businesses by interacting with an AI assistant.

Called Yelp Assistant, the feature lets you interact with a large language model — the same sort of process as when you type a prompt into ChatGPT or a similar chatbot — to find the right professional for jobs around your home.

By asking you a series of questions about the issue at hand — like, say, an upcoming move or a

Low-Cost Home Repair Franchises: 8 Opportunities for 2024

The home services franchise industry has proven its stability after years of steady growth. Here are eight brands offering low-buy-in opportunities to break into the attractive industry.

The home services market proved itself during the COVID-19 pandemic, and it has continued to soar in the years following. While many homeowners partnered with home services providers during the pandemic to improve the space they were suddenly spending much more time in, the pandemic also encouraged many consumers to reconsider how they spend their time.

Now, as the aging population becomes less able to complete home repair projects on their own, and