What’s Happening with Home Renovations
Top of Mind
Home Renovation Trends in 2025
This chapter explores the surge in home renovation demand in early 2025, driven by New Year's resolutions and rising home equity. It examines the impact of economic factors on homeowner decisions and the shift towards renovations as families choose to stay in their starter homes.
In this episode of the Top of Mind podcast, Mike Simonsen sits down with Julie Kheyfets, CEO of Block Renovation, to talk about what’s happening with home renovations this year and beyond.
About Julie Kheyfets
Julie Kheyfets is the CEO of Block Renovation, the AI renovation platform empowering
homeowners and contractors to build better together. Block’s AI delivers instant cost, scope, and design guidance tailored to each homeowner, powered by proprietary data from thousands of projects. By accessing Block’s vetted network of contractors, homeowners can discover the right professionals for their projects, rapidly receive easy-to-compare proposals, and hire with confidence, backed by Block’s project protections.
Before being appointed CEO, Julie served as Block’s COO, steering Block’s operations as the company evolved from a one-stop shop for renovations to an AI marketplace platform. Julie brings a strong track record of scaling AI to help consumers in complex industries. Before joining Block, she built and led the North America business for Tractable, the AI platform for accident and disaster recovery. During Julie's tenure, Tractable became the world’s first computer vision unicorn for financial services.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- How to match consumers with contractors
- Why so much of the difficulty in remodeling are “problems of information”
- The surprising relationship between interest rates and remodeling
- Block’s unique demand renovation demand data and what it’s telling us about the market right now
- How changes to the immigration system will impact the remodeling industry
- Why productivity in construction has not improved in 50 years and why that is about to change
- Trends in AI that homeowners should pay attention to
- Why AI and information have the potential to dramatically improve the consumer relationship with the contractor
- The most important demographic trends and what they tell us about the home renovation market over the rest of the decade
- Which local markets are the leaders and laggards in renovation
Related to this episode:
Featuring Mike Simonsen, President of Altos Research
A true data geek, Mike founded Altos Research in 2006 to bring data and insight on the U.S. housing market to those who need it most. The company now serves the largest Wall Street investment firms, banks, and tens of thousands of real estate professionals around the country. Mike's insights on the market have been featured in Forbes, New York Times, Bloomberg, Dallas Morning News, Seattle PI, and many other national media outlets.
Follow us on Twitter for more data analysis and insights:
About Altos Research
The Top of Mind Podcast is produced by Altos Research.
Each week, Altos tracks every home for sale in the country - all the pricing, and all the changes in pricing - and synthesizes those analytics to make them available before becoming visible through traditional channels.
Schedule a demo to see Altos in action. You can also get a copy of our free eBook: How To Use Market Data to Build Your Real Estate Business.
The Top of Mind podcast features top real estate industry insiders and experts to unpack the most important housing, real estate, mortgage data and trends that are shaping the housing market. Hosted by Altos founder Mike Simonsen and produced by the HousingWire Content Studio.
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