It will not come as a shock to learn that newly released data from the U.S. Census Bureau confirmed home improvement spending dropped sharply during the housing market crash and the Great Recession.
What might be a little eye opening, however, is just how hard the remodeling business, especially smaller-scale businesses, was hit. As the Housing Perspectives blog reports, 51 percent of general residential remodeling businesses that existed in 2007 were no longer in business in 2012. Not only that, but the smaller the businesses were, the harder they were hit.
70 percent of remodeler establishments with $100,000 or less in business receipts in 2007 were out of business by 2012. Comparatively, only 25 percent (still a large number) of remodeler establishments with $5 million or more in receipts suffered the same fate.
