Remodeling is like golf. Tens of thousands play the game, but it is the rare player who consistently shoots par or better. Like golf, remodeling is an easy business to enter, but only a few build businesses with highly satisfied customers. Many remodelers, despite their best efforts, struggle to improve and make only halting advances.

From its inception in 2005, the goal of this survey series has been twofold. First, we want to put a mirror to the entire remodeling industry from the perspective of remodeling customers and benchmark performance on a macro level. How often, for example, have you heard about remodeling projects gone awry? Certainly it is a weekly occurrence for many remodelers. Homeowners consider you an expert, so you listen to their stories about the never-ending project, about the truckload of windows they had to send back because they were ordered incorrectly, about maddeningly long absences from the jobsite, or about unexpected cost increases. Therefore, the first goal of this series is to attempt to put numbers to all of those stories. Like the average score in golf, customers, in general, give remodelers a middling score of about 6.5 on a 1 to 10 scale, with 1 being the lowest level of satisfaction and 10 being the highest level of satisfaction. These middling scores hold true across several performance criteria.

The second goal of this survey series is to identify critical issues by parsing those scores, and thus highlight the places within the remodeling process where remodeler/client relationships require the most focus. We know from previous surveys that remodeling customers offer a wide spectrum of satisfaction scores for their remodelers, contractors and home improvement professionals. We know from past surveys that if a customer says they are willing to either hire their remodeler again, or they are willing to refer their remodeler to a friend, that those remodelers tend to get much higher satisfaction scores. Therefore we have asked these questions again as a baseline for new questions and new potential differentiators.

To enhance the questionnaire this year, we consulted with Geoff Graham, president of GuildQuality, a firm that offers customer-satisfaction measurement and analysis for over 500 builders, remodelers, contractors and architects around the country. In the GuildQuality measurement process, customers grade their remodelers in part based on the number of “punchlist items” remaining to be completed at the time of the final walk-through. This year we added “punchlist items” as a sixth criterion for benchmarking satisfaction alongside overall satisfaction, professionalism, timeliness, price and workmanship. With Graham’s input we added questions about whether customers lived at home during their remodeling project and whether they planned to remodel again in the next 12 to 24 months. One new question gauges satisfaction as it relates to “green” remodeling, while another differentiates between those customers who sought to “improve” their homes vs. those whose projects were aimed at “maintaining” their homes. In the end, all of these factors were superseded by a sense that customers were very forgiving of all remodelers who are attentive, communicative, good at setting expectations, and frequently on the jobsite.