NJ has some of the least affordable home remodeling prices

First came the pandemic and everybody cocooned at home and took a long, critical look at their house, then came the explosion in New Jersey home prices and people decided it was cheaper to remodel than buy a new house.

The unfortunate thing is that New Jersey has some of the least affordable remodeling costs.

According to Frontdoor.com, several New Jersey towns land squarely in the bottom for affordability of home renovations.

Here’s how they crunched the numbers:

For each of the most populated cities in the U.S., we used Houzz.com’s home project planner to estimate the cost of remodeling the five main rooms of a house (living room, kitchen, bathroom, bedroom and dining room) using professional contractors and budget-grade products and materials.

To calculate how affordable a full house remodel would be in each location, we compared the estimated price of a local remodel to that city’s average household income (sourced from census.gov).

Elizabeth came in ninth among the most expensive cities in terms of actual dollars: $85,872. That seems like a lot to me, but for some people they could do that without breaking a sweat.

That’s why they also determined the most and least affordable cities in which to remodel a house, based on the percentage of the average local’s annual salary needed to be spent on remodeling.

When figured that way, Newark makes the top ten of least affordable cities, checking in at #3; the average remodel requires 203.76% of an average Newarker’s annual salary.

Nationally, the most expensive states for remodels in dollars is Naperville, IL, at $100,975. As a percentage of salary, Detroit is the highest; it requires 220.94% of the average salary.

Opinions expressed in the post above are those of New Jersey 101.5 talk show host Bill Doyle only.

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