Change in the Air: How Builders Plan to Navigate the Future

It’s very rewarding being a construction marketing researcher. I truly enjoy tracking, measuring, and predicting changes within the construction industry. But what I enjoy even more is helping our clients continue to reshape their businesses and product offerings to ensure they are providing the greatest value to their customers. This work requires regular interaction with builders and remodelers, keeping our “finger on the pulse” of the industry through interviews, focus groups, surveys, and jobsite observation. We listen and learn about their purchasing behaviors, problems at the office and jobsite, and the solutions they need or opportunities they are seeing.

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Smart Home Tech for All: New Builder Study Reveals Pervasiveness of Home Electronics

In December 2021, Home Innovation polled builders about changes to their business practices due to the pandemic – asking what they viewed as temporary, and what they considered a permanent part of their home building business going forward. While issues surrounding labor and materials took the forefront, and there was a notable boost in practices related to the outdoor living boom, there was another change reported that was a bit more unexpected – a wider embrace of “smart” home technologies. In their explanations, many builders said they had been caught off-guard by the expansion of home tech and were scrambling to keep up with the expectations of a new wave of tech-savvy buyers. I gave an overview of these study findings in my presentation to the Leading Suppliers Council at the 2022 International Builders’ Show.

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Latest Insights into New Home & Replacement Markets for Windows & Doors

Earlier this summer, I was invited to deliver the closing presentation of the WDMA 2022 Annual Technical and Manufacturing Conference. I shared 10-year market trends on window and door purchases in new and remodeled U.S. homes and insights into purchasers. As I have for more than 20 years, I sourced my data from Home Innovation’s annual trusted and industry-leading Builder and Consumer Practices Reports.

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Supply Chain, Labor Markets Creating Opportunities for Alternative Building Materials

Labor and supply chain issues have shaped the industry in recent years, particularly since the COVID pandemic. The net result has been longer construction cycle times, rising construction costs, and simply a much more difficult environment for building and remodeling homes. Our recent 2022 Builder Practices Survey sheds more light on how builder choices of home features, products, and materials has changed in response to these market conditions.

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Let’s Go to The Tape: Market Opportunities Presentation

Earlier this spring, I was asked to be a guest speaker at the Pressure Sensitive Tape Council’s Tape Week conference in Buena Vista, Fla. I provided the audience with an in-depth review of six key market opportunities for pressure-sensitive tapes and adhesives in residential construction, referencing our most recent Builder and Consumer Practices data trends and key drivers and market volumes for the six product categories. Below is a brief recap of the presentation takeaways:

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Market Reflections: Home Kitchen Remodeling in 2021

Home Innovation recently published our 2022 Consumer Practices Reports, based on the latest survey of households on home improvements and repairs in 2021. Kitchen remodeling is still hot – maybe even a bit “overheated” – and changes in material choice trends have been very fast-paced. Quartz continues to gain at the expense of the once-dominant Granite for Countertops; both came in at nearly equal shares (around 25%) of kitchen remodels. Marble also gained, but Laminate and Acrylic Solid Surface continued to lose their luster in the eyes of homeowners.  Kitchen Cabinet trends continue as they have been — painted cabinets with flat-panel-in-frame designs are the most popular in home kitchen remodels at 28% of all cabinets installed; finally surpassing the former #1 position holder, cabinets with raised panel doors and wood finish.

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2022 Consumer Practices Reports Available

The results of Home Innovation’s 2022 Consumer Practices Survey (CPS) on home remodeling are in and analyzed! The top overall finding is that U.S. and Canadian home remodeling purchases are still very strong, two years into the pandemic. The DIY purchaser segment is back to near-historical levels after a spike in 2020, and the outdoor living category is still blazing hot.

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Current Market Trends & New Opps Revealed for Plastics In New Construction and Remodeling

On March 1st, I was pleased to speak at the opening session of AMI’s 2022 PVC Formulation Conference in Cleveland. I provided an overview of product trends in new homes and remodeling from 2011 to 2020, tracking market shares of PVC and other plastics products. I concluded with a discussion of how the past two tumultuous years are now resulting in opportunities for plastics. I covered the product categories where PVC is already a big player in the market, and those where they could become one, including flooring, piping, siding, decking, fences, and others. 

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Housing Innovation: It’s What We’re All About

In late February, I participated in an interview/discussion during the Building Products Strategy Summit held by John Burns Real Estate Consulting. The subject was innovation in the U.S. housing construction market. When I joined Home Innovation Research Labs nearly 30 years ago, my initial assignment was to support the Advanced Housing Technology Program (AHTP) – a deep exploration of barriers to innovation in home construction, to evaluate and catalog more than a thousand beneficial new home technologies. The AHTP program was initiated to answer concerns that innovation in housing lags other industries. The insights uncovered through that program, along with other diffusion-of-innovation research I’ve been involved in, serves as the foundation for Home Innovation’s current marketing research practice.

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COVID Changes - Temp or Perm? Part 2

In taking another look at our recent survey of builders regarding the permanence of 22 business and new home changes adopted during the pandemic, we found that most practices – aside from the strictly virus-spread-mitigating ones – will be retained by more than half of builders who responded to the survey. These include practices such as utilizing a greatly-expanded network of building product suppliers, and putting more emphasis on outdoor living space, healthier indoor air quality, and home layout changes that provide space for remote work and schooling. See where there were differences in what will stay and what will go based on size of builder, as well as local vs. regional vs. national differences.

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