Block Renovations Julie Kheyfets about trends for home renewal
Kheyfets: We help homeowners find the most familiar place to plan and hire for important renovation projects. You think of large bathroom remodels, remodels of kitchen, entire home innovations, and that is where we concentrate. The renovation space is so fascinating. It is a market of $ 470 billion dollars. Nevertheless, most people still have a really challenging experience.
Simonsen: Where does the artificial intelligence (AI) come in?
Kheyfets: While we saw on stage in recent years, what seemed very natural in the renovation space to use AI to tackle all these problems of information.
If I say information about information, they are things like trying to find out how much it would cost to finish my basement. AI can deeply understand your space and vision and give you guidance that is personalized for your needs about things like Design, the scope of the work and the actual costs.
Simonsen: One of the things we do on this podcast is to find unique datasets that we can understand. Do we have other things we can look at in the data?
Kheyfets: We see very interesting data on request. We are still in January and we see the question considerably, even starting from the last few days of Q4 and on the way to Q1.
Now the Q1 is usually highest in terms of renovation -question during the year. This year we see the question of the Q1 that is actually higher than the last few years – about 25% higher than 2024 and 2023. And it starts to approach 2022 levels. And if you remember, the rates were very different in Q1 2022.
Simonsen: What is the dynamics that renovations yields if the costs of money are too?
Kheyfets: One is a home sale, the world in which you live. When the sale of home has risen, renovations go up, because more people buy a house and they want to adapt to their needs. The opposite is true when the sale drops.
The other that may not be that intuitive is replacement. The reason for this is that they cannot move to a new house, so they are almost forced to evolve their existing house to their needs.
The rest of the conversation includes specific aspects of home renovations. But Simonsen and Kheyfets also investigate the impact of work changes and rates on industry.
Simonsen: Tell me if you have insight or insight into both the labor and the rate situation. What happens in renovation?
Kheyfets: In the current conversation there has been a discussion about immigration and there is a real question about the scale of change in terms of limiting immigration. Also, what types of immigration are we talking about? Where we are focused, tries to stimulate the efficiency for contractors so that they can concentrate on doing what they do best.
