Remodeling is up, and that’s good and bad news

The BuildFax Remodeling index for April just came out, and it found that major residential remodeling (the kind of stuff that requires a permit) was up nationwide by 12 percent over last year, and up 14 percent in the South. (It’s also up month to month.)

So what?

That’s bad news for Realtors in a sense because it’s reflective of consumers deciding to stay and fix up their existing homes, rather than looking to buy a new one. (Which means that those homes aren’t available for others to buy, too.)

But it’s good news because it means an improvement in property values for those neighborhoods. In a sense, the money and sweat put into a remodel is shared across the community. So in the long term that’s a good thing for prices. (Especially as all those REOs are going to have the opposite effect as they begin to deteriorate.)

Read more over at BuildFax itself.