Housing bubble drives home improvement

“In the San Francisco Bay Area, you’re talking about some of the most expensive housing prices in the country, and home prices have gone up dramatically,” said Brad Hunter, chief economist at HomeAdvisor, a website that matches people with home-improvement professionals. “We’ve seen a huge increase in the amount of homeowner equity, which stimulates home-improvement activity. It makes people feel richer, wealthier and more inclined to invest in their house.”The increased equity allows more access to home equity lines of credit and loans for those who need it, Hunter said, and it brings people who were formerly underwater in their mortgage back to a position where they can sell their homes and move — stimulating more home-improvement spending from home sellers and buyers.A report from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies shows that the New York, San Francisco, Denver, Boston and Washington, D.C. metro areas were the nation’s five top-ranked remodeling markets.

The problem being they do it all at  once.