WESTFIELD – For over 60 years, Keith G. Roy Construction, Inc. has been providing high-quality remodeling and renovation services throughout western Massachusetts and northern Connecticut. In the last few years, however, they have seen home-improvement activity decrease as a result of the weakened economy and falling property values.
Now, according to the Massachusetts Association of Realtors reporting that prices for single-family homes in Massachusetts have seen a 2.7 percent increase from a year ago in April, there is hope that the housing downturn may be coming to an end. And that, says Keith G. Roy, President of Keith G. Roy Construction, is making area homeowners more optimistic about investing in repairs, renovations, and additions.
“In recent years, homeowners were afraid that spending on major remodeling projects would not pay off in terms of getting their property values back up to where they were,” said Roy. “Since the reports started coming out about home prices stabilizing, I’m getting calls from people looking to start projects, some of them major.”
Roy’s observations are backed up in a recent study conducted by the Remodeling Futures Program at the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, which forecasts a double-digit growth in annual homeowner spending on remodeling by the first quarter of 2013.
According to Kermit Baker, director of the Remodeling Futures Program at the Joint Center, home-improvement activity has been “bouncing around the bottom of this cycle for almost three years now, waiting for the industry to get some traction. Now,” Baker goes on to say, “the combination of low financing costs, stronger consumer confidence, improving home sales, and the perception that home prices have stabilized in most markets… is encouraging owners to start working on the list of home-improvement projects they have been putting off.”
More information about the study is available at www.jchs.harvard.edu/lira-remodeling-activity-poised-strong-growth.
While all this is good news for his industry, Roy believes homeowners need to exercise caution when starting any project.
“People have to be careful about who they hire,” he said. “There are too many companies that make promises they can’t keep. If a contractor doesn’t show up when he says he will, or if the materials used are not of the quality the homeowner expected, the reputation of everyone in my industry suffers.”
Roy went on to say that there is only one way to earn consumers’ trust: by building a reputation for acting professionally and with absolute integrity.
“At Keith G. Roy Construction, we’re all about follow-through,” he said. “When we say we’ll get the job done right, we’ll get the job done right.”
