Charlotte home renovations are booming in a tight market

A historically low number of homes are on the market for sale. Home prices are at all-time highs in most parts of the city.

That makes finding a larger house inside city limits is almost impossible. So what’s the solution?

Home renovations and additions.

Charlotte contractors say that their business has never been stronger as homeowners increasingly look to stay put in their neighborhood instead of trading up and moving out.

“They’re having their best year since — fill in the blank,” said Mike Waite, executive director of the Charlotte chapter of the National Association of the Remodeling Industry, unable to come up with a year that’s been better.

Homeowners are updating rooms from the 80s and 90s.

Neighborhoods like Dilworth, Sedgefield and Myers Park are full of older homes from the 1940s or 1950s being torn down and rebuilt.

Homeowners are primarily choosing to renovate instead in neighborhoods built in the 1980s and 1990s, the next band out from the center city, says Don DellaMea, president of Spain Construction in Charlotte. These neighborhoods are seeing a surge in interest among young families wanting to avoid commutes from South Carolina.

The most common remodeling projects in Charlotte are kitchen and bathroom renovations. After that, homeowners are choosing to add rooms to their homes, build screened-in porches or remove interior walls to create more open floor plans, DellaMea said.

While renovation activity was strong even during the economic recession after 2009, the activity has spiked as Charlotte’s real estate market grows ever tighter.

“Remodeling just took off,” DellaMea said. “People want to stay in Charlotte.”

Contractors are staying busy.

Waite said that Charlotte is one of the top 10 markets in the United States in terms of remodeling activity right now.

This has put pressure on contractors — but the good kind.

“They’ve got all the work they can handle, now they have to get it all done,” he said.