With this post NAHB announces the release of its latest estimates of spending on improvements to owner-occupied homes at the zip code level.  The new estimates are for calendar year 2018 and include the number of owner-occupied homes, the number with improvement spending during the year, the average spending per improved home, total spending on improvements within the zip code, and the drivers of remodeling activity used to generate the spending estimates, in each of over 26,000 5-digit zip code areas across the country.

The new estimates show that, in the average zip code, owners who improve their homes in 2018 will spend $7,893 per home; but, as you would expect in a country as large as the U.S., there is considerable variation.  As the map below shows, there are many zip code areas where spending per improved home is under $5,5000, and many where it is over $11,000.  Zip codes with high spending per improved home tend to cluster around large metro areas—especially in the Northeast.At the very top are 17 zip codes where estimated spending per improved home is over $18,000.  Ten of these are in the New York-Newark-Jersey City Metropolitan Statistical Area, two are in Fairfield County, Connecticut; and one is in a suburb of Boston.  Of the remaining four, two are zip codes on Lake Michigan in Cook County north of Chicago, and two are close-in suburbs of San Francisco.  A summary of the remodeling estimates for each state is available here.

All estimates are based on a statistical model that relates both the number of owners who improve their homes and the amount spent per improvements to the following drivers of remodeling activity:

In the above descriptions, more remodeling means both an increased tendency to undertake remodeling projects, and a tendency to spend more per project.  These tendencies were estimated statistically using data on remodeling spending and the above-listed drivers of remodeling in the American Housing Survey (AHS, funded by HUD and conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau).  NAHB then projected zip-code level data on the drivers of remodeling from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey forward to 2018, and applied the AHS-based model to the 2018 projections, in a way consistent with NAHB’s most recent national forecast of improvements to owner-occupied housing in 2018.

The 2018 projections of the drivers of remodeling, along with the estimates of home improvement spending in each of over 26,000 zip codes spanning the entire country, are available for sale on NAHB’s web site with discounts for NAHB members and NAHB Remodelers members.

Tags: economics, home buidling, housing, improvements, remodeling, remodeling by zip, remodeling by zip code, zip code