In the Media

Growth in spending on home improvements and repairs is expected to peak in 2022 with expenditures reaching $427 billion in the third quarter, up 20% year-over-year, according to a report by the Remodeling Futures Program at the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University.

“Although home remodeling is expected to accelerate broadly across top metros, ongoing shortages and rising costs of labor and building materials may dampen activity in the coming year,” Carlos Martín, project director for the Remodeling Futures Program, said in a news release.

Those kinds of replacement projects make up about half of home improvement spending, according to Abbe Will, who follows the industry at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. She projects that home improvement spending will grow 17% this year nationally, partly driven by inflation. The long-term average is about 5%.

Whitney Airgood-Obrycki, lead author of a recent report from Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, said there was a lot of “pent-up demand” after the initial months of the pandemic, when many young people moved back home with their parents.

Abbe Will, senior research associate at Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies, tells Bloomberg Radio's Denise Pellegrini to watch for a world of uncertainty and possible pain if you're embarking on a home improvement project this year.

However, there are still a lot of Americans who can't afford to move because of the rising cost of mortgages, rents, and the ongoing pandemic, said Riordan Frost, a research analyst at the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University. "There's an assumption that most Americans have figured it all out, but that's totally not the case," said Frost, who's written extensively about where Americans have moved during the pandemic.

“The rising costs of labor and construction materials, difficulty retaining contractors, and climbing interest rates could discourage owners from undertaking new or larger remodeling projects,” said Abbe Will, associate project director of the Remodeling Futures Program at JCHS.

The apartment vacancy rate has reached its lowest level since the mid-1980s, according to a report from the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.

By the end of 2021, the number of renter households increased by about 870,000 compared with the first quarter of 2020, according to a report from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. The overall rental vacancy rate had dropped to the lowest level since the mid-1980s.

Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies reports the vacancy rate has reached a 40-year low. Some share of that reflects a rebound from 2020’s steep declines—but most does not.