The home renovation boom: Tradies say demand ‘unheard of’

Sunday, 24 August 2025

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Falling interest rates may have helped give home owners confidence to invest more in their own properties, say tradies.

They say their work pipeline is starting to pick up again - even over the winter months when it’s traditionally quieter.

Canterbury tradie Matthew Quinn from Ōtautahi Builders said his team of four builders were pretty much booked out until the end of the year, and he’s considering bringing on an apprentice to meet demand.

“We're seeing a lot more … renovations. People want to spend money on their own home, from bathrooms to kitchens.

“What I see is the little guys are spending the money, so that kind of makes me feel confident.”

The level of demand for the winter season was “somewhat unheard of”.

Normally people save up to renovate over summer, “but no, there seems to be some confidence [to] just get it done now”.

Seeing more people were “pushing the button” on renovations now rather than holding out, he was feeling “a lot more optimistic” now than he was even a month or two ago and was expecting his workload to continue increasing into the new year.

“From what I've heard from developers, the small guys who do like one or two projects a year from a single storey residential to about three townhouses, the word on the street is they’re wanting to get into it.”

Fellow Christchurch-based tradesperson Ziggy Conroy from Zen Builders said things were also busy for his team - a noticeable improvement from the post-Covid era.

He believed consumer confidence had improved as a result of falling interest rates. His work pipeline was now about four months, also mostly with home renovations and extensions.

“That's not fully booked out, but it is enough to keep us busy,” he said.

The Reserve Bank on Wednesday lowered the official cash rate to 3% - a widely anticipated move that had seen major banks pre-emptively lower mortgage rates. Further cuts have been signalled for later in the year, expected to benefit 40% of fixed mortgage holders whose rates will roll over within six months.

Meanwhile, ASB’s chief executive Vittoria Shortt revealed on Wednesday that customers had made $17 billion worth of additional payments to pay down their home loans between July 1 last year and June 30 this year.

Builderscrack, a service that matches jobs to tradies, reported “heightened demand” from home owners so far this year, when compared with 2024, with close to 10,000 jobs posted in July - a 32% increase year-on-year.

“For context, on average, that’s one job posted every five minutes,” the site’s marketing lead Rachel Radford said.

“That trend is continuing into August – we're halfway through, and it's currently projected to reach a 35% increase on August last year.

“Demand for home improvement naturally picks up in spring, with summer being our busiest season, so we’re watching closely to see if this period will surpass the heights of the post-Covid reno boom in November 2021.”

In Christchurch in particular, Conroy felt things were improving for smaller operators.

“I think there's a lot more effort being put into our city, which is probably good for us, and it flows through with residential as well.”

Times may be tougher for others in the sector, added Quinn, such as painters and plumbers - but he felt confident their workload would also pick up.

“They're reaching out to me, offering their services, trying to introduce themselves. I think that the slow period … they're probably just seeing it now, or feeling the effects of it now,” he said.

“We come in, build a home, or go out and quote a renovation, and get it under way and, let's say a painter - that’s further down the line.”

But, he added: “I'm definitely passing on more work to my contractors than I did.”

Graham Stewart, who owns Graham’s Painters in Wellington, said the last few weeks had seen growing demand for both interior and exterior work.

“We’re even better than normal this time of year, we’re quite shocked. Normally it’s sort of September onwards, but people are getting out earlier. We’re looking at a very positive summer,” he said.

“We’re getting a lot of people … a cross-section. We’re getting the pensioners, but we’re also getting young couples in their 30s with kids [with] equity in their home.”

It had been tough, “but we’ve actually seen a change”.

In Auckland, self-employed builder Ali Hulameh said he had enough work to keep himself busy for the rest of the year - though as a sole trader, he did not have to worry about any employees.

“I would get worried if I didn't have the next, like, three months planned.”

He believed confidence had picked up, largely for everyday home owners.

“There seems to be enough work to keep a small company running, if your prices aren't super high. But bigger companies where they have [costlier] overheads and everything, where they're having to charge a bit more money, are finding it harder to get bigger jobs, so they're kind of having to take on smaller things,” he said.

“I think the main thing that's going to make a change for smaller companies is interest rates dropping.”

Sector commentators paint a less rosy picture.

“People have been pretty tight with their money, and developers are not progressing ahead with work,” Gareth Kiernan, chief forecaster at Infometrics, said.

However, despite this, confidence levels across the industry have been “reasonably strong” since last year, but “getting too excited about an upturn any time soon is probably a bit premature.”

There was a “modest upturn” in consents starting to come through towards the end of the year, though this wouldn’t translate into immediate work.

“I'd say coming through into early to mid-2026 you may see a bit of a pick up through there, but I guess I would caution that there's probably also not a lot of substance behind that,” said Kiernan.

“Ultimately, one of the big constraints we see on activity going forward is that net migration is still weakening, and so you haven't got that fundamental of population growth to drive more demand.”

Julien Leys, chief executive of the Building Industry Federation, said the Government’s pledge to start $6 billion worth of infrastructure projects before Christmas was welcome, but a little late.

“The pipeline of building activity for a lot of builders and construction firms has come back from 12 months to now … and added to that is that many projects, particularly over winter, have been put on hold,” he said.

There was always a “lag” between the announcement of investment and the actual time when shovels would be in the ground, he added.

“[It] can often be six or so months so,” Leys said.

“It might be some time before that [bigger] flows into the wider industry and starts to soak up some of the people that are out of work.”

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