Quick Answer: Homeowners are renovating instead of moving because mortgage rates above 7% make selling expensive, and sellers now stay a record 11 years. For contractors, that means marketing to long-term owners and staying in touch with past customers, who will hire again.
You probably remember the pre-listing calls. Someone needed a roof that would pass inspection, or the buyer's agent flagged a fence, and they wanted it done cheap and fast. Once the house was sold, you never heard from them again.
You're getting fewer of those calls now. The person on the other end of the phone has usually been in the house for a while and isn't planning to leave, which should change how you market to them.
Selling would mean a much bigger mortgage payment for most owners. The 30-year fixed rate averaged 7.40% as of October 8, 2026, up from 6.30% a year earlier, according to Freddie Mac's weekly mortgage survey. Anyone who bought or refinanced when rates were lower gives that rate up the day they sell. That's mortgage rate lock-in: homeowners stay put because selling would trade a cheap loan for an expensive one.
So they stay. Home sellers owned their homes for a median of 11 years before selling, the longest the National Association of Realtors (NAR) has ever recorded. NAR's economists think lock-in is likely part of the reason. And the money that would have gone toward a down payment goes into the house instead.
More and more, it's an older owner. People aged 65 and over accounted for 27% of home improvement spending in 2023, nearly double their 14% share two decades earlier, according to Harvard's Improving America's Housing 2025 report.
They're mostly paying to replace things. Roofing, windows, HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning), and similar replacement projects made up 49% of improvement spending that year, and the average homeowner spent almost $4,700.
What that means for your marketing:
Talk about the years they'll spend in the house. Someone who plans to stay wants work that lasts and makes the place nicer to live in, and they'll often pay more for it than the lowest bid.
In practice, that looks different in each trade:
Rising power bills make the energy pitch easy. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) expects homes to pay an average of 18.2 cents per kilowatt-hour for electricity in 2026, up from 17.3 cents in 2025, and it expects 18.7 cents in 2027, according to its October 2026 Short-Term Energy Outlook. A homeowner who's staying will pay every one of those increases, so upgrades that cut the bill are worth more to them each year.
Then make sure your website says the same thing. A homeowner who clicks an ad about a roof built to last and lands on a page full of discount banners gets two different pitches, and plenty of them won't stick around to sort it out. A conversion-focused website picks up right where the ad left off, with the same promise and an easy way to book.
Because they'll hire again. Someone who stays 11 years will need more than one project in that time, and your past customers end up being some of your best future jobs. A homeowner who likes their new roof is going to call that same roofer about gutters.
Here's how to stay first in line:
If your customer list lives in spreadsheets, inboxes, and your reps' phones, moving it into one CRM is usually where to start.
It should, as long as mortgage rates stay well above what most owners locked in, even though total spending has dipped this year. The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) Remodeling Market Index came in at 61 for the second quarter of 2026 and has held in the low 60s for a year, and NAHB names rate lock-in as a key reason. Anything above 50 means more remodelers rate the market as good than poor.
Put photos and reviews from jobs you finished years ago on your site and in your ads. Someone planning to stay a decade wants proof that your work holds up, and a five-year-old roof or fence that still looks good makes that case better than a fresh install.
Stay in touch on a schedule tied to the job each customer bought, using the follow-up steps above. They already trust your crew, and you don't pay for an ad click to reach them, so a repeat job usually costs less to book than a new lead.
No. Pre-listing repairs still happen; there are just fewer of them. Keep a campaign running for sellers, and allocate most of your budget to owners who are staying.
Some are stalling, so expect longer decisions on large jobs. Remodeler surveys show cost pressures are delaying projects, especially larger ones, and 74% of remodelers in one recent survey said suppliers had raised material prices since March. Bring up financing early in the sales conversation so price doesn't push a big job to next year.
Rizen's SmartLeadGen campaigns run your ads, landing pages, CRM follow-up, and tracking together for home service companies. You'll see which booked jobs came from new homeowners and which came from past customers back for their next project.
Request a Free Marketing Conversion Audit to find where homeowners who are staying put are slipping through your marketing.