Upgrading their homes instead of moving, high mortgage rates and home prices have kept many Americans in place. Many experts report that is to continue in 2025.
According to some estimates, homeowners have trillions of dollars of tappable equity in their homes which they could use to access Home Equity Lines of Credit (HELOC) to help fund renovations. And some housing market watchers are seeing an aging U.S. home supply as ripe for updates.
“For most people, it doesn’t make sense financially to move,” said Ben Carlson, director of Institutional Asset Management at Ritholz Wealth Management. “So if people are going to be staying in their houses longer, and they have all this equity just sitting there, for a lot of them, it’s going to be hard to ignore,”
Home improvement spending rose at an annualized 8% rate in the first half of 2024, according to Goldman Sachs economists, who said in a recent report that rising home equity “presents a tailwind for continued spending growth.”
