Research Team

• Hanley Wood, the parent company of Remodeling, distributed an online survey to real estate professionals to obtain estimates of resale value. Nearly 1,500 responded at least in part.
• The Farnsworth Group, an online market research company, programmed and hosted the Remodeling Cost vs. Value Web-based survey. It collected and compiled the data between August and October 2016 and also provided consulting.
• RemodelMAX, a publisher of estimating tools for remodelers, used Clear Estimates remodeling software to generate cost estimates for all 29 projects in 99 markets.

Margin of Error

The value portion of the Cost vs. Value report is based on a survey. For the national numbers, our statistical partner at The Farnsworth Group has set the confidence interval at 95% +/- 2.6. This means that if the survey were repeated, 95 times out of 100 the results for any project’s cost-value ratio would be within 2.6 percentage points of the numbers we published. For instance, our 70.1% ratio for a fiberglass grand entrance could be as low as 67.5% or as high as 72.7%.

Because the sample sizes for each of the nine census regions are smaller, the potential margin of error is wider. Confidence intervals for each of the nine regions are shown below. The sample sizes of individual markets are too small for us to give margin of error confidence ratings.