Renters Open Door To DIY Renovations

"Many Americans unable to buy a home right now are renovating their rentals instead.

Resigned to stay in place until the housing market improves and unwilling to live with dull decor, renters are swapping out fixtures, landscaping terraces and ordering custom furnishings. Online furniture retailer Wayfair Inc. said bookings for easily reversible add-on services like installing new doorknobs and drawer pulls have tripled since last year.

Renters say that not owning a house shouldn't prevent them from having a place that feels like home.

"My mind-set is that I'm living now and want to enjoy now," said Dinah Eke, 37 years old, a pharmaceutical project manager who shares a rental apartment with her husband and three kids in New York City and posts renter-friendly DIY tutorials on social media.

Nesting renters are one indicator that the housing market is at or near a peak, said Ken Johnson, a Florida Atlantic University economics professor who studies housing and rental markets.

"It makes no financial sense to invest in a property you are renting," he said. "What's driving this is that it's incredibly expensive to switch from renting to owning."

In September, the cost of buying a single-family home in the U.S. was $888 more per month than renting one, according to John Burns Real Estate Consulting. Confidence in the U.S. housing market hit a new low earlier in November with 16% of Americans indicating that they felt it was a good time to buy a home, according to the Fannie Mae sentiment survey. Lease-renewal rates also reached an all-time high last year, according to real-estate research firm RealPage.

Priced out of the home market or uninterested in committing to higher rates on 30-year mortgages, renters are putting up temporary peel-and-stick-wallpaper, a popular upgrade for those looking to customize their space on a budget.

Temporary wallpaper outsold traditional wallpaper nationwide for the first time in August, according to wallpaper seller Spoonflower. Sales of peel-and-stick wallpaper in large rental markets like New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Austin are double to triple that of traditional wallpaper sales, according to Chasing Paper, another online seller. Wallpapering requests on gig-booking app TaskRabbit are up 38% so far this year.

Kathleen Adams, a 35-year-old marketing strategist and restaurateur, put up geometric patterned peel-and-stick wallpaper in her bedroom in June, just before re-signing the lease for her New York City apartment for two years.

She moved into the building in 2017 shortly after her bid to buy an apartment for herself fell apart due to construction delays. Since then, city home prices jumped 46%, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

Like most renters, Ms. Adams was hesitant to make alterations to a space that she didn't own. Lease agreements typically require tenants to leave units as they were on move-in day. Making changes often means renters have to pay both the cost of renovations and undoing them.

Ms. Adams lived in New York for more than a decade before she drilled her first hole in the wall, to hang a painting during the pandemic. Since then, she has transformed the cement deck overlooking the street with artificial grass and mood lighting, and commissioned a custom-size piece of art to fill the wall in her living room nook.

"If I'm going to spend my summer doing DIY stuff, it means I'm going to be here for a while," she said.

Nesting renters have given a surprise boost to interior-design companies like Havenly, which had expected a slowdown as the housing market cooled. Its 2022 sales growth rate has outpaced last year, driven in part by a 20% increase in spending by renters, said Lee Mayer, chief executive of the online company that designs layouts and sells furniture.

"If you were a renter planning to buy a house next year, all of a sudden you're going to be a renter for a few more years," she said. "If it were only a few more months you probably would not have put up that wallpaper."

The majority of Americans continue to believe that housing is a good financial investment even as the percentage of renters who believe they will ever become homeowners fell to an all-time low of 43% last year, according to an annual housing survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Spending money to upgrade a home you're renting may not make sense economically, but that doesn't mean the satisfaction of living in a more attractive space isn't worth it, Prof. Johnson said. Depending on the owners, tenants may even be able get landlords to contribute to the cost or negotiate a rent reduction in exchange for renovations.

"Homes mean more to people than just a financial investment," Prof. Johnson said.

Some tenants say that it can make financial sense to upgrade a rental when compared with alternatives, especially in cities with soaring rents.

When Kayla Fory, 30, moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles last year for a job, she settled for a small, poorly lighted apartment and immediately got to work renovating.

Ms. Fory estimates that she's spent roughly $1,000 on renovations including replacing all of the generic hardware on her cabinets and drawers with antique glass bulbs, upgrading the lighting fixtures, and removing the blinds and glass shower door in favor of curtains.

"If I were to go to an apartment that was perfect looking, I would be spending $1,000 more on rent every month," she said. "The longer I'm in the space, the more cost effective that decision was."” [1]

1. Renters Open Door To DIY Renovations
Moise, Imani. 
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 01 Dec 2022: A.13.