Home Renovation Dynamics – from a Homeowner and A Designer’s perspective
Everyone agrees that Home Renovation is not an easy job and comes with a wide range of experiences. There has been many instances where the overall experience has left both the Designer and the Customer deeply frustrated and disappointed. It’s one thing to say that the market is unorganized and fragmented which leads to such experiences, but as a young startup with great aspirations to change the overall working dynamics, we wanted to get to the bottom of this.
We have recently conducted a detailed survey asking relevant questions to both Designers and Homeowners, to understand the root cause of such discomfort. Our survey revealed many interesting aspects regarding the overall working dynamics and helped us pave way to various solutions that we intent to provide on our platform.
The Home Improvement Experience – From a Designer’s Perspective
Our target Designers while doing this survey where Architects and Interior Designers primarily working independently as freelancers with minimal access to corporate resources. Since homeowner’s typical reach out to such individuals they formed our focal point of study.
What the survey said?
While we sent out a detailed questionnaire seeking information regarding the entire working model, some key takeaways that we could infer are as follows:
•72% of the Designers from our survey are freelancers who directly engage with Homeowners. Only 16% of the Designers we spoke to prefer engaging with a Contractor instead.
•64% of the Designers still use offline reference to win new work. Only 12% of the Designers use online lead generating platforms such as Houzz and Homify. With 14%, Facebook is also a major lead generating source.
•Designers’ have no specific working model and equally prefer Turnkey and Design + Supervision methods.
•When we asked, what stops Designer from taking up larger roles, 48% says it’s due to the fact that Homeowners engage a Contractor first and another 26% says homeowner doesn’t see Designer’s requirement as critical.
•47% Designers feel the biggest source of conflict with Homeowners is in price escalation.
The Home Improvement Experience – From Homeowner’s Perspective
While our primary focus of the survey was to understand the home improvement dynamics from a Designer’s perspective, we identified a select few Homeowners who recently renovated their home and discussed with them to understand their perspectives as well.
What the survey said?
Our discussion with the Homeowners who has recently undertaken Home Improvements provided an interesting insight into their perception about what they feel could be improved. We will try to cover these in detail in our next Blog, but in the meanwhile, here are some key takeaways from those discussions:
•Large percentage of homeowners still prefer to go with a Contractor as this is a standard practice prevailing around them.
•They also typically feel hiring an Interior Designer is expensive.
•Contractor appointed Designer didn’t provide much of a value add.
•However, 66% of them felt the contractor’s knowledge did not help them make right decisions.
•Price variation and not adhering to timelines and commitments were primary source of conflict with contractors.
•None of the projects we surveyed completed within committed budget and timelines.
Conclusion
While there could be many inferences that could be drawn from the study but few findings such as Homeowner’s preference to use a contractor, their opinion on Designers, and overall lack of accountability towards committed timelines and budget cannot be argued.
We will dig a bit deeper about these findings in our next blog and identify few solutions which could help improve the overall Home Improvement experience.
We hope you find the contents in this article helpful and would be glad to hear about your experiences as well. You may write to us at info@squareo.in in case if you would like to reach out to use.
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