Battered renovation market finally looking up?
New home sales get most of the attention these days.
A big jump in new home sales in October helped push stocks up earlier this week.
Yet almost this was primarily a regional increase, not a national trend, with almost all the increased sales activity taking place in the South.
That makes sense give the sprawling geography of the region and the still relative plenty in terms of buildable land.
But it’s a different story here in New England and especially in highly developed Eastern Massachusetts, where buildable lots are hard to come by and town officials are not necessarily welcoming new homes with open arms.
A more meaningful indicator in some ways for the metro Boston housing market may not be new homes, but rather renovation activity.
We don’t have a lot of land to build new homes on, but we sure do have a lot of older homes that need new work.
Renovation activity headed into a deep swoon starting in 2007 and, for the most part, hasn’t stopped.
Still, the rate of decline has begun to moderate, with the Harvard’s Joint Center predicting some modest year over year increases in the first half of 2010.
“Remodeling spending by homeowners shows early signs of stabilization,” said Nicolas P. Retsinas, director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies, in a press statement. “While the housing recovery has been erratic, a strengthening economy could produce spending increases on home improvement projects by the second quarter of next year.”
Though still getting hammered on Wall Street, Home Depot is now talking up the idea of stabilization as well.
It’s a subject that’s close to my heart, with my wife Karen and I having just wrapped up a major renovation and addition to our roughly 100-year-old Natick fixer-upper.
When work on our house was at its peak back in early 2009, we were pretty much the only decent sized renovation project in our part of town – or at least that’s what our work-starved contractors told us.
With a growing family of three children five and under, it made more sense for us to fix up and build onto what we had than trying to sell and move to a larger house.
Anyway, I am betting we will soon have a little more company on our still frequent forays to Home Depot.
