Home Renovations Were Always Tough. Now Many Are Giving Up Mid-Project.
Labour shortages and high demand have meant months-long slowdowns for people waiting to fix up their homes
4 min
USA: A surge of home renovations in recent years combined with a shortage of contractors is turning more repairs and remodels into never-ending nightmares.
New homeowners and those renovating always expect projects to require more time and money than their contractor estimates. But for many, the costs have become so high and the waits so long that some are now abandoning projects midway, forcing them to live among half-finished renovations for months. Others are taking up the drywall themselves.
A renovation now takes 79 days on average, up 259% from 22 days in 2019, according to Jobber, an operations-management company whose software is used by home-service professionals. Remodelling is more expensive: Hourly wages for general construction workers are up 42% over the same period, from $35 to $49, according to insurance analytics firm Verisk. Material costs have climbed, too.
The Federal Reserve raised short-term interest rates by another quarter percentage point on Wednesday, a decision that will likely continue to suppress purchases of new homes. More people who had planned to move may now stay put and renovate their existing property, says Abbe Will, a researcher at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.
Spending on home-improvement and repair projects in the U.S. increased by an estimated 15% in 2022 to a record $567 billion, following an 11% increase in 2021, according to a report issued Thursday by Harvard’s housing studies centre. Historical growth has averaged around 5%, says Ms. Will, the lead author.
Baxter Townsend and David Zlotnick thought buying an outdated Manhattan apartment and renovating it would be more affordable than new construction. Over a year and $250,000 into a remodel quoted to take a maximum of 15 weeks and around $100,000, they say they regret their decision.
The couple had to pay to completely redo the electrical work after Mr. Zlotnick tripped a circuit and sent sparks flying by plugging in a vacuum. The tiles in the primary bathroom are crooked and the sinks askew. Still, they dismissed the design firm they had been working with this month so they could finally move back home.
“We’re like, ‘Pack up and get out. It’s been a year. Please leave,’ ” says Mr. Zlotnick, who works in international shipping logistics. They plan to hire a different firm to finish the project, if they can find one.
New recruits needed
Those renovations and repairs can’t happen quickly without an influx of qualified workers. The construction industry will need to attract more than a half-million additional workers on top of the normal pace of hiring in 2023 to meet the demand for labor, according to Associated Builders and Contractors, a trade organisation.
General contractor Miguel Villamil employs four people in Indianapolis, and says he has struggled to find more workers. His lead time for projects has stretched up to seven months, and he has raised prices for his services considerably to stay staffed. He pays his workers a starting salary of $20 to $25 an hour, up from $12 to $15 in 2020.
He says he is frustrated with contractors who deliver rushed and shoddy work—hurting the industry’s reputation—and with homeowners who don’t always recognise the realities of the marketplace.
“It’s a big, big, big problem,” Mr. Villamil says. “People without experience starting their own businesses, but also big companies who end up hiring subcontractors who have no experience because they have no choice.”
Facing long waits and high prices, some impatient homeowners are taking matters into their own hands—with varying results.
Total homeowner spending on do-it-yourself improvement projects grew 44% between 2019 and 2021, to a record of $66 billion, according to the Harvard report.
Mr. Villamil has picked up jobs from homeowners who tried, and failed, to do it themselves.
“Some of them do a halfway-decent job,” he says. “Some of them don’t.” He adds that one client inadvertently wired the TV to click on every time he flipped the light switch. “They try their best,” he said.
DIY by necessity
Laura Hrusovsky wasn’t trying to save time or money when she became the general contractor on a massive home-repair project. She just didn’t feel like she had a choice.
About a year ago, Ms. Hrusovsky came home from a day out with friends to a sopping entryway carpet and water cascading out of the light fixtures. An upstairs toilet had sprung a leak from the water line, spewing hundreds of gallons of water through her 3,800-square-foot home in Valparaiso, Ind.
When their preferred general contractor said he couldn’t start for another six months, her husband, Jim Hrusovsky, had an idea. “I said to Laura, who is very well organised: ‘Are you willing to try it?’ ”
She took on the 40-hour-a-week project, but isn’t happy she had to. “I just lost a year of my life,” she says. She says she has a newfound appreciation for construction work.
Evan Moody and Autumn Furr bought a second home in New York’s Catskill Mountains in summer 2021. The couple expected the few cosmetic upgrades and repairs on their list would take a couple of months. Almost two years later, the house still isn’t finished.
After getting turned down by every electrician in the area, Mr. Moody ended up pleading with one who was two counties over. On top of a $100 surcharge for travel, he said he could only come on a rainy day when he couldn’t do the outdoor work that made up most of his income. A storm didn’t occur for weeks.
Tired of waiting, Mr. Moody recently took a week-and-a-half away from his job in advertising to build a back deck himself. He knew he was in trouble and needed a professional to finish the job when he had barely gotten the holes for the posts dug by the end of day two.
“I think that going into this, we had the perception that we were very good DIYers,” Mr. Moody says. “I learned that, in fact, I wasn’t.”
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2 min
The typically busy spring season for the housing market was a dud, and the summer isn’t looking much brighter.
Housing services companies like Zillow Group and Rocket RKT +3.78% were loud and clear last week on earnings calls: Rocket CEO Varun Krishna called the quarter through June “one of the toughest spring housing markets in years.”
Jeremy Hofmann, Zillow’s chief financial officer, said on a conference call that the company predicted earlier this year that the market for mortgages would be flat. “We actually now think it’s going to be down low-to-mid-single digits,” he said.
The rest of 2026 will remain challenging for mortgage origination volume, says KBW analyst Bose George. The question now is what happens in 2027. “If mortgage rates remain [around] 6.75%, I think that’s going to be challenging even for next year,” he says.
But what’s bad news for mortgage companies could be a positive for bargain hunters. Buyers can expect prices to grow more slowly—or mildly decline—with less competition as long as mortgage rates remain unpredictable.
Mortgage rates at the beginning of the year were solidly below year-ago levels, notes Zillow senior economist Kara Ng. But they surpassed last year’s levels recently, she adds, referencing Freddie Mac’s weekly survey of 30-year fixed mortgage rates. Last week’s reading, at 6.69%, was higher than year-ago levels for the first time in 2026.
“From the affordability point of view, it’s going to get more challenging in the second half of the year,” she says. “And when affordability gets more challenging, that impacts sales and home price appreciation.”
Mortgage application data tracked by the Mortgage Bankers Association has cooled since the beginning of the year. The trade group expects that the number of mortgage originations in the remaining two quarters will lag behind last year’s levels, after exceeding 2025 levels in the first half.
Rocket’s early-stage data—which the company told Barron’s it derives from its brokerage Redfin, demand for its mortgage products, and signs in its servicing portfolio that a homeowner is preparing to refinance or move—“leads us to expect the third quarter mortgage market to be smaller than the second,” Chief Financial Officer Brian Brown, said on the company’s call. He added that such an occurrence is “something the industry has not seen since 2022.”
Prices will be about flat nationally, Ng says. Zillow’s most recent forecast, which shows how values are expected to change in the year ending June 2027, show them dropping in roughly half of the 100 largest U.S. metros for which data is available.
Buyers aren’t rushing in at a time when mortgage costs are rising and unpredictable. But those with the right combination of patience and cash could stand to benefit. “If you are financially qualified to buy a starter home, you are facing less competition and you’re more likely to get a price cut,” Ng says.
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