Resource Center

July 13, 2017 With all the talk of the “dawn of the smart home,” you might think the technology is only a few years old. In fact, it’s been around since at least 1984, the year the National Association of Home Builders formed a “Smart House” task group to explore ways to integrate technology into…

Each quarter, HomeAdvisor works with The Farnsworth Group — the top market research firm in the home improvement space — to conduct a survey among nearly 2,000 home service professionals to measure confidence in both their business and the industry. Q2 results are in, and landscaping companies are rolling in the green and mowing over…

June 21, 2017 New data on existing home sales just out from the National Association of Realtors (NAR) show strong demand in the month of May.  As a matter of fact, demand was stronger than expected, based upon the average forecasts of economists nationwide.   The new NAR report highlights that inventories are extraordinarily low right…

June 19, 2017NAREE, the National Association of Real Estate Editors, always attracts thought leaders and interesting speakers to their national conference in Denver, and last week’s was no exception. I wanted to share some points made by other speakers that I found to be of interest. Of particular interest to me was the panel of…

If you want to know the future of the smart home, a nondescript hotel on a lonely stretch of highway near San Francisco International Airport might not be the first place you’d look. Unless, that is, said hotel was the scene of CONNECTIONS, an annual gathering of industry’s insiders and influencers that’s billed, rightly so,…

May 24, 2017 The latest monthly data on new home sales showed a bit of a pullback, but the overall trend continues to be solidly positive.  The spring selling season is going extremely well for most builders, and pricing power for them is proving to still be strong so far, even in the face of…

May 18, 2017 The home improvement industry is growing almost twice as fast as the rest of consumer retail.  Homeowners are increasingly willing to open their wallets when it comes to investing in their homes. The latest data point adds further evidence of this trend:  sales at Home Depot stores in the quarter were $23.9…

New Lot Development is Not Keeping Up With Demand Builder confidence indicators show that home builders are extremely confident. That said, the pace of new construction fell in April (-2.6% versus March, and essentially flat versus a year ago).  We see the overall pace of new home construction as still rising at a modest pace; I…

May 3, 2017 (Percentage of “location within home” for Aging-in-Place Modifications) A key factor driving the current surge in home improvement relates to the changing needs of the baby boom generation.  Age and mobility-related modifications are already a $13 billion sector of the economy, and growing rapidly.  More importantly, this surge will incorporate a broader…

In our new HomeAdvisor report, we revealed the findings of our latest survey of homeowners.  This random sample of 500 homeowners reported that they have increased their expenditure on home improvement/repairs/maintenance by 57% in the past twelve months.  At $5,157 during the last twelve months, this is also a higher level of per-household spending than…