What’s Being Spent in 2019? HomeAdvisor’s State of Home Spending Report 2019 is Now Live.

by Mischa Fisher, Chief Economist | July 2019

Do older houses need more emergency repairs? How much are people spending on home improvement? What’s the growth rate of overall spending and what factors contribute to annual household spending?

Those insights and more are inside our recently launched 2019 State of Home Spending report.

To understand any marketplace or economy, one must examine and study the dynamics of both suppliers and consumers of goods and services. Within the marketplace for home services, that means looking at both service professionals and homeowners, the latter of which are covered in our State of Home Spending report.

The Report

For the first time this year, we broke out consumer sentiment and consumer behavior across all three major categories of home service spending to better understand the marketplace dynamics that drive spending for home services.

  1. Home Improvement
  2. Home Maintenance
  3. Home Emergencies

Topical Interest:

As a recent homebuyer myself, the insights on spending for both new and experienced buyers, as well as the change in spending one should expect based on a home’s age were particularly interesting.

As a millennial, I also found the differences in behavior and motivations across generations to be particularly compelling. There are distinct and meaningful differences between what drives behavior and preferences across generations in multiple marketplaces, and the market for home services is no different.

This report represents some of the most thorough publicly available research to date on consumer spending in home services and is an integral part of HomeAdvisor’s research efforts around understanding the complex dynamics of the overall marketplace for home services.

Key Points:

  • Overall spending on improvement is up 17% from last year
  • There’s a 5:1 ratio of improvement to maintenance spending
  • Millennials, more than any other generation, are motivated by a need to get ROI on their properties.

There are dozens of other insights, so I’d encourage you to check out the full report.