U.S. Homebuilding Lags, Remodeling Picks Up the Slack

Cambridge, Mass. -- The U.S. home remodeling market expanded by more than 50% since the end of the Great Recession, according to Improving America’s Housing 2019, a report to be released by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. The 20th anniversary report in the series produced biennially by the Center’s Remodeling Futures Program finds that, as homebuilding struggled to meet the nation’s growing housing needs, spending on improvements and repairs to both owner-occupied and rental properties hit a record of nearly $425 billion in 2017.

“With new construction slowly recovering from historic lows, 40% of the country’s 137 million homes are at least 50 years old,” said Abbe Will, associate project director in the Remodeling Futures Program. “The aging of the housing stock has been a boon to the remodeling industry, with spending surpassing investment in homebuilding every year for over a decade, and contributing 2.2% to U.S. economic activity in 2017.”