What’s Happening with Home Renovations

Mike Simonson here. Thanks for joining me today. Welcome to the Top of Mind podcast. If you follow along with Altos Research, you're familiar with our weekly real estate data video series with the top of Mind podcast, we seek to add context to the discussion about what's happening in the market from leaders in the industry. So each week, Altos research tracks every home for sale in the country, all the pricing, all the supply and demand, all the changes in that data. And we make the insights available to you before you see it in the traditional channels. People really need to know what's happening in the housing market right now. So if you need to understand the housing market or communicate it to others, go to altos research.com, book a free consult with our team. We can review your local market, teach you how to use market data in your business.

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Okay, let's get to the show today. I've got a terrific guest today. I'm excited to talk to her. Julie k Fitz. Julie is the CEO of block renovation, an AI platform for simplifying home renovations and connecting homeowners and contractors. So they help homeowners across the US offering clear cost and scope estimates, deep visualizations, access to trusted, vetted contractors. Julie has been with Block for a while starting to as the COO Stream Blocks operations. And then the company's evolved from a one-stop shop for renovations to an AI marketplace platform. So Julie and Block are tackling a few topics that I'm interested in exploring more deeply so in the housing market, like renovations and remodeling, and also how AI is shaping the housing market right now. So we're going to hit all those things today and probably more so. Julie, welcome to the show.

Mike. Thank you for having me. Really excited to be here.

Alright, well let's start with block Renovation. Tell me about the company and what you guys are working on.

Yeah, so Block is an AI renovation platform. We help homeowners find the most trusted place to plant and hire for major renovation projects. You think about major bathroom remodels, kitchen remodels, gut home remodels, that's where we focus. The renovation space is so fascinating. It is a 470 billion market, and despite that big of a market, most people still have a really challenging experience. That's both on the homeowner side and the contractor side. With homeowners, it's really hard to figure out how much things should cost, what kind of work is going to be required, how you make the hundreds of design decisions required to go and renovate your space. And also who should you work with, how do you find a contractor that you trust? And then on the contractor side, it's hard to figure out how do you grow your business as small businesses. Contractors are often managing projects out of the field, trying to deal with broken materials, trying to sell business, trying to manage their teams, trying to close the books. They're torn in so many directions. And so what we do is help homeowners to renovate confidently and then we help contractors grow their thriving businesses as well.

So where does the AI come in?

Yeah, good question. So as we thought about, as we just watched AI emerge on the scene, even over the last couple of years, what seemed really natural in the renovation space is to use AI to tackle all these problems of information that exist. And when I say problems of information, that's things like as a homeowner trying to figure out how much would it really cost to go and finish my basement to go and redo my kitchen. If you go and look for this information, people spend months googling around reading blogs and they just drown in generic information. If you look up the cost of a bathroom remodel in New York City, you'll find information that tells you it's between 10 and a hundred thousand dollars. But how do you budget 10 to a hundred thousand dollars? What do you do with that? And the reason that happens is because every home is so different, unlike new construction where you have land that's a little bit more of a blank slate with renovation, you have an existing space that's probably had work done, maybe permitted, maybe not permitted, you open up a wall, there's another wall or asbestos or mold, you have these unforeseen conditions.

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So every single renovation has to be personalized and that's where AI can really come in. So what AI can do is deeply understand your space and your vision for what you want to accomplish and give you guidance that's personalized to your needs on things like design, the scope of work and the actual costs.

And let's do some basics. So you're working national, nationwide?

We work coast to coast, yeah. The way we work

(04:45)
Is we open cities market by market. The reason for that is because we want to really focus on creating that personalized guidance to give homeowners that cost design support that's really localized their space, but then also to enable them to hire contractors who can bring their visions to life. And the way we do that ladder piece is by building and maintaining a network of vetted contractors and every market we operate in. So we go and for example, in the fall, we opened up Chicago, Philadelphia, Southern Connecticut. What we did in those markets was go and recruit contractors whom we vetted to make sure they're high on quality workmanship insurances is right, licenses are right. They have no department building violations and they're the right fit for our network of homeowners or our homeowners. But to do that, we need to actually go deep in the market and understand the contractors. So it's really market by market.

Got it. Okay. And I just completed two bathroom remodel projects, so I'm going to have that in my mind as we're talking today. Okay. So the marketplace, meaning you get the consumers there for the contractors, you get contractors there for the consumers and then you, which is like the origin of the company. Yeah, that was the origin of what exactly. Got it. And so then you've built a technology layer on top to help doing, I like the concept of the problems of information. Now that's the business that we're in. And if I think about my bathroom remodel project, it was like a contractor works on a friend's place, he comes over, he sketches stuff on literally the back of an envelope. And I hired a design interior designer who came out and actually did measurements and things, and then we started hacking away at stuff. So tell me where we insert block in my process.

Yeah, really interesting. And before I answer that, I'll ask you what kind of research did you do before going and finding your contractor? Did you just

Ask? No, no. I called my buddy. Yeah, I called one friend. They're like, who did your work? He's like, yeah, I talked to this guy and we talked for, he is like, I'm finishing up another project, then I'll do yours. That was

It. And that's what most people do. Probably 60 70% of homeowners ask around. They see who worked on their neighbor's place and they hire the same contractor. And that works out some of the time. The thing that we saw is not every contractor is right for every homeowner. You might just want somebody who will do it fast, who will do it on a certain budget and just get it done. Your neighbor might have very specific preferences for materials. We have some folks who've traveled to Europe and picked out some tile that they love in Spain. That contractor, that person needs is very different from somebody who will do it quickly on a budget. And so one thing that we really focus on is actually understanding every homeowner's needs and helping them to find the right contractors. We see out in the wild. A lot of homeowners really struggle with their contractors. In part it's because they're not a good fit. Not every contractor is the same. It's not like finding an Uber driver. They offer very different capabilities, different strengths, different budgets, different crews. So actually deeply understanding what kind of business they run and where they're strong versus where they might not be focused. That's really important. And most homeowners have no way to do that because that information is really opaque. It's not out there.

And so then as you're building your preferred contractors, do you have structured data about them or is it an AI unstructured sense where you're like, oh, we can look at a bunch of photos and figure out if this is the right contract? Tell me how that works.

Yeah, really good question. That data is structured. So we really deeply understand these contractors. We only accept 7% of contractors who apply to work with us. So it's quite different from Angie's List, which is more focused on just getting you a volume of contractors to choose from. And we have a lot of data on things like material storage and material selection. Will this contractor take you by the hand and take you to a showroom to help you pick out tile? Or maybe all they focus on is building things like their subcontractors. Do they have that amazing tile guy who can lay your tile from Spain or do they have somebody who will just get the job done? So that's all part of our onboarding and also part of how we work with these contractors on an ongoing basis. So we know all of them and their businesses intimately. They do a lot of work through us, and so we continue to get data on them because we get feedback from our homeowners. So things like reviews, things like how long it took them to break ground, how long did it go from break ground toit to the next milestone? All that data exists in our platform.

That's interesting. And one of the things we do on this podcast is seek unique data sets that we can understand. So tell me about that. Are there things we can look in there in the data and say it's taking longer to get projects done or we can see prices changing? Do you have unique data that you can see the market with?

Exactly. We do and we have that in multiple places. So we have it upstream. So where is demand coming in and how is it coming in? We also then have it in construction. So exactly as you said, our projects taking longer. Are they taking longer nationally? Are they taking longer in certain cities? Are they taking longer? Maybe just for this one contractor who maybe overscheduled his crews because he was so eager to grow this year. And that's data that we look at really proactively.

Cool. Do you have any examples like what's happening right now?

Yeah, I love a fellow data nerd, always eager to talk about the data. We are seeing very interesting data on demand. So it is early in 2025, we're still in January and we are seeing demand up significantly, even starting from the last couple of days of Q4 and heading into Q1. Now Q1 usually is the highest in terms of renovation demand across the year. That's been consistent for ages. The reason for that is people come back, they have their new year's resolutions, they've spent a bunch of time hosting in their homes, they want to go and improve their spaces, but this year we're seeing Q1 demand actually higher than it's been the last couple of years, about 25% higher than 2024 and 2023. It's beginning to approach 2022 levels at least for Q1. And if you remember, rates were very different in Q1, 2022.

Yeah, 25% higher is a significant increase in demand for remodeling at that time. So it gets to another thing that I was curious about. We can see in January, home sales are ticking down fourth quarter, they were up year over year, but now they're down since rates jumped back over 7% and they're declining weekly on a year over year basis. So obviously home buyers are very sensitive to rates, rates over 7%. As rates got closer to 6% last year, we could see the demand needle move. So what's the dynamic there that is saying that's driving renovations up significantly up when the cost of money is up? Is there something else at play?

It's really interesting. The relationship between rates and renovation demand is multidimensional. So there are a couple of mediating factors. One is home sales, the world in which you live. As you can expect when home sales are up, renovations are up because more people buy a home, they want to adapt it to their needs. Or when home sales come down, that's a little bit of a depressor on renovation demand. The other thing that happens, which might not be as intuitive, is substitution. So for example, if inventory is low or rates are high for buying and people can't buy, they end up actually substituting renovations a good portion of the time. The reason for that is they can't move to a new home. So they're almost forced to evolve their existing home to their needs. On a macro longitudinal level, we see this with starter homes. So the tradition for ages was you'd buy your starter home, you knew that was not your final home, your family would grow, you'd buy your next home and eventually you'd be in your forever home.

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What we're seeing now is more and more often the starter home becomes the forever home because folks can't afford to upgrade and they have to even as their family grows and make use of the space that they have. And so what happens over the years with rates and home sales is when home sales are growing like crazy, renovation demand is growing as well. And we saw this for example, in 2022 and 2021, renovations were growing at 20% year on year in terms of total dollars total projects as home sales dipped, as rates came down or rates came up in 2023, renovations plateaued. So they didn't fall as much as home sales did. They flattened and now they're beginning to tick up again.

Okay, so this 25% increase in renovation activity that you're seeing is really sort of off a low baseline or from as picking up from flat over the last year is how we'd look at it.

Exactly. And this is an early indicator. This is just people seeking out renovation services from us. It's not necessarily sold

Contract, it's a leading

Indicator. Exactly. I would say it's still early days, but it is interest and demand versus sold, closed, finished renovations.

Got it. Okay, great. So that's a demand interest indicator, which okay, so that makes sense. Those are people saying, well, I'm moving this year. Exactly. Okay. So they are frustrated by, they've been stuck in place for two years and they're like, I may never get out of this place. Okay, so that's an interesting angle. Are there other drivers, other macroeconomic drivers that you're noticing drive that to go into that equation?

Yeah, home equity has been a really interesting factor in all this. So Americans home equity is up 80% since 2019. It's just massive. It's close to $35 trillion now. And that's a factor of two things primarily. One is home values have risen so rapidly. The other is that folks have been paying off their mortgages, people have had their 3% mortgages, no one's really moved, so they've just been chipping away at those. And so homeowners have more and more equity, which then allows them to borrow. So maybe you can't afford to upgrade your home to go and move to a new one, but now you have a bunch of equity against which you can take out a heloc, a home equity line of credit to go and pay for your renovation and maybe you can get that at five, 6% even if you don't want the mortgage at 7%.

Right, right, right. Yeah. Okay. Alright. So that's really fascinating. I've got a couple other things I'd like to get to though. I'm interested, maybe this is the right time to get to, there's a couple of policy things that are now on the potential agenda that could impact renovations and this could be a sensitive topic to talk about, but tell me if you have any insight or view on both the labor situation and tariff situation and what are you looking at and what's the conversation happening in renovation?

Yeah, those I think are top of mind for everybody regardless of industry labor is interesting. Labor has been a topic of conversation and renovations long before this election, long before even the last couple of administrations just because labor shortages have been really top of mind. And that is at every level, that is unskilled labor folks actually building that's also skilled labor. So if you think about general contractors, if you think about their project managers and foreman managing crews on site, those tiers of the industry are aging, they're aging out, and there's a real struggle to find not just builders, but also skilled labor to go and build your business with and manage your crews. In the current conversation. I think with the discussion of immigration, there's a real question about, first of all, what will be the scale of change in terms of restricting immigration and also what kinds of immigration are we talking about?

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I can't get enough guys on my crew to go work this project or are we talking about, hey, actually skilled labor is going to be significantly constrained, dialed back, and so maybe there's not going to be enough architects or engineers. All these things are topics for discussion for sure. And really top of mind where we are focused is trying to drive efficiency for contractors so they can focus on doing what they do best. Our platform helps them basically to find demand, to find homeowners who have a real clear budget, real clear scope of work, clear designs, and they're ready to go. What that means is contractors can then spend less time selling, trying to manage homeowner communications, having to explain what it means to move plumbing and they can just focus on building.

So some technological efficiency to the business that helps maybe mitigate some of the scary things that are on the horizon.

That's the hope.

Okay. All right. I buy that. I buy, that's a good application. So are there other trends in the renovation space in general? Big picture stuff that I should know about as I'm thinking about the housing market in general and the country we're in

And related to things that are top of mind politically after the election. Efficiency in construction has declined significantly in the last 50 years. If you look at output per man hour today in construction, it's similar to what it was in the 1970s, which is really staggering. You think most industries with technology, with advancements just go up and up and get more efficient. Part of the reason for that is regulation at every level. Contractors have had to deal with more permits, more regulations, more approvals to go and build projects just like developers have now. Deregulation is top of mind right now at the federal level. If any of that percolates down to the local level, that could significantly have an impact in mitigating some of that impact on labor shortages.

That's fascinating. I guess I didn't realize that the productivity of workers in this space has not really improved in that time. Oh, okay. It does feel like there's some political will starting to take hold and start to solve some of those things for our great affordability crisis that we have in the country right now. Okay, that's really fascinating. So let's switch to ai. Let's start. One of the questions I like to explore is as you're building an AI platform, it's very easy to label that, but I'm interested in where the wins are and the way I see this too, I had a conversation with a buddy this weekend who runs a mega tech company in San Francisco here, and we were talking about where AI and they have 5,000 customer service people are that they can shrink down and are getting dramatically more effective. So that's an internal facing application I see. As opposed to an external facing, which is like, do I upload some pictures and get the pictures processed or generative pictures on the way out or what things are going to look like? Where are the wins in AI in your business?

Yeah, I think especially if we go back to those problems of information that exist out in the industry, I see so much potential for AI to create access to services that couldn't be accessed to folks in the mainstream. So for example, architectural support in San Francisco. I think where you are in New York where I am, it's hard to get an architect for under $20,000. Now, if you are doing a $20,000 bathroom project, if you're sprucing up a half bath, you're not going to pay 20 5K for an architect. You're kind of on your own. What AI can do is deliver that support. So really help you understand your space, explore designs, figure out what materials you need, how much it'll cost, and do that 24 7 on demand at a fraction of the cost. So those things and applications for users, both consumers and small businesses, I think is where a lot of potential lies.

That's cool. Are you able to deliver on any of that yet? Or where are the parts that are coming in first?

Yeah, so if you think about the way that architects work, so in figuring out what to do with your space, you have to make hundreds of decisions. What kind of tile do you want? What kind of fixtures do you want? What kind of fixtures do you want? And people have very strong instincts. I like this. I don't like that some folks want a really clean bathroom aesthetic. They want white with white accents as bright as possible. Some people want dark colors, moody a statement, and the folks who want the light colors think the dark stuff is just wrong. You feel it deep in your gut and vice versa by the way. But most people aren't able to actually articulate that to a contractor. And so what an architect does is to show you stuff. They say, okay, this is your space about five by seven.

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What if we did it like this? And you say, oh no, I could never do that. Or they say, okay, how about we do this? And if something just clicks. So especially with generative ai, what we can now do is very quickly say, okay, you say you have a five by seven space. We have photos of it, we know the layout, we know you have a window right here, and we can tell from our onboarding that you did that your aesthetic is essentially mid-century modern and you like some bright accents. How about this? And an AI can do that in seconds. An architect needs to spend probably two weeks rendering that, sketching it out in some CAD system like Revit actually rendering it, getting it back to you. Then you make changes. They take another two weeks with our ai, you can do that instantly and you can just put in so many iterations in a highly personalized way. So that's what our platform is doing today.

That's cool. Okay. That's exciting. I can imagine getting there instead of going, even when you're working without an architect, you're still googling around for weeks and trying to find stuff. Okay, that's cool. So are there bigger picture AI implications further out that you're seeing?

Yeah. One thing that's really top of mind for a lot of folks in technology across industries is the notion of going from copilots to agents, copilots being these platforms or these tools that guide you, but you are the ones still doing the work. You are the ones still making the decision. You are the ones still clicking the buttons, whereas agents do the work for you. And right now you might see OpenAI just I think unleashed or released its early agent operator. Others are releasing theirs with operator. For example, you can say, buy groceries for me to make carbonara tonight. And it'll go and it'll click for you and it'll say, okay, I looked up on all recipes.com, here's a recipe, tell me what you have in your fridge. You tell it what you have in your fridge, it goes and clicks the buttons for you on Instagram, and it says, do you want me to check out for you? So that's a simple agent that does the work for you. And I can imagine more and more of that happening in renovation as well. So instead of let's say our platform showing you a bunch of different visuals and different designs and you having to click this one, not this one, this one, not this one, you can just talk to it and it'll actually deeply understand what resonates with you and do that work for you.

Yeah, yeah. Okay. So you could get to a world where you've defined the picture, you've defined the aesthetic via the generative pictures. You could get to a space where ultimately it's going and you could imagine saving a lot of time for the contractor by going, okay, here's a materials list and ordering and scheduling, and I could imagine some efficiencies kicking in there

A ton. Just the amount of administrative work that has to happen throughout a project both for the homeowner and the contractor is just staggering. And it always sneaks up on you and it always adds up. If you had an agent trained to do that for you, that could save you so much time.

Yeah. Okay, cool. Let's switch back to another big picture topic, which is I'm thinking about things like demographics and so when we're talking about renovations, we talked about this a little bit with folks staying in their homes, not buying right now, what are some other big things that I should be thinking about in terms of the renovation space and what's going on in the country?

Yeah. I find that there are really interesting generational dynamics happening right now. You probably hear a lot about millennials trying to buy their first homes, gen Z, kind of looking ahead and seeing what's down the road for them 10 years from now. But boomers still hold a significant portion of residential real estate in the country. And as boomers age, first of all, a lot of folks are aging in place, so there's adapting those homes to be usable. But eventually what we're starting to see is millennials actually inheriting wealth and inheriting homes and looking for support, actually renovating those homes. A lot of those homes haven't been worked on in decades. The average home in America is over 40 years old, and that's the average. So you can imagine what the oldest end looks like. Now, millennials are famous for doing their research and being very neurotic and not just going with their neighbors contractor or their uncle's contractor. And they're also used to doing a lot of things online or on their phone. And construction is a heavily offline business. So I expect to see over the next 10 years, then 20 years, a lot more real estate land in the hands of millennials who then try to figure out what to do with it.

Okay. So we look at millennials are maybe finally going to be the biggest home buyer segment. The boomers are still the biggest home buyer segment. Okay. So that essentially bodes well for growth in the renovation space over the next half decade anyway, until the path moves again. Cool. Are there other macro factors that drive different from other parts of the economy or different from housing in general?

Yeah, I think we've talked about a good portion of them. At the end of the day, our housing stock as a country is just really old, and that's what we're seeing today to keep going up.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So let's then talk about further term future. So we talked a little bit about the demographic trends. Do you have a longer vision and maybe one way to look at, it's like are there things that the headlines get wrong now? Are there things that people, the zeitgeist is that we should correct our view on?

Yeah. One thing I'd love to see change and I think will change is this trope of the untrustworthy contractor. There's so much, this goes along with the problems of information that we talked about. There's so little trust in the industry in part because information is so opaque and homeowners feel like there's such an information disadvantage. What I hope to see over time is more of the industry comes online as more information is readily available. I hope to see a lot more transparency and trust if set up the right way. Contractors and homeowners should really work as partners. You have a homeowner with a vision they're willing to pay to achieve that vision. You have a contractor who they're matched correctly, is the right builder to go and bring that vision to life. If they can find the right way to talk to each other, they can have a great experience working together as partners. But today, I think so many homeowners bring a contractor in, they expect 'em to be crooked or to disappear in a week, and it's hard to start off even a working relationship on the wrong foot like that. So I hope to see that change.

I like that. That's a similar dynamic with real estate in general where people don't trust realtors and they think they're being overcharged. And that information is the advantage for showing or establishing the trust and the expertise. Are you finding that in your platform that contractors get to establish that? Is there a way, are they establishing that trust better? Can you measure customer satisfaction improving or things like that?

Yeah, so for us, trust is driven by transparent information in the platform. So for example, homeowners considering contractors can see every project that that contractor has done on the platform, how much it cost, how long it took, what the build was like, what were the photos before and after. That is transparently there. What homeowners are surprised to see is that contractors are willing to share this information on the backend in the contractor experience. And this surprises a lot of people. We also make it transparent to contractors, what they're bidding against. So we anonymize it, but if you are one of three contractors bidding on Mike's project, you can see that you're bidding this much. This is your scope, this other guy's bidding this much, and this is their scope. And contractors actually love that. And homeowners assume that sometimes assume the contractors want to hide information and they want to conceal information so they can tack on more profit.

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They just want information to work with and they don't always overbid or underbid, they just want feedback on what they're up against. Similarly to when homeowners decide not to work with a contractor, contractors begged us to find out why they wanted that feedback because they want to improve. But because the industry is so fragmented, every contractor out in the wild feels like they're on an island. And so they put in a bid, they never hear back and they don't know why. Well, it's really hard to improve when you get no feedback that way. Throughout our process, we really focus on driving more transparency and putting information out there.

Great. How many contractors do you have on the platform?

We have a couple of hundred contractors, and we are live in about 10 markets.

10 markets, okay. Like 10 big, 10 big markets.

Exactly.

Do you notice any regional differences in those markets?

Oh, hugely. Yeah. This was one thing we learned the hard way early on. We started in New York and we opened up LA and we're like, oh, LA is just like New York. LA is not like New York at all by any stretch of the imagination. Folks in New York, they want it done fast. They don't really care how much it costs. They want 'em done for them. They want white subway tile, and I'm generalizing a little bit, but they don't want to make decisions because they're working a hundred hours a week at Goldman Sachs. Folks in places like LA or maybe in the Midwest, well they host. They have a little bit more space. They want the space to feel like theirs. And that's why for us, it's so important, even though we're in multiple markets, to treat each market as if it's our only market and to really deeply understand it because Chicago, New York, la, they're all so different.

And so when you look at the differences in a regional market, you're thinking about consumer preference differences.

Fair? Yes. So there's consumer preference differences. They're also very different contractor differences or separate contractor differences. For example, in Boston, the biggest pain point is even finding a contractor. So there's a massive shortage of builders in Boston. If you find a contractor, good luck having them start less than a year out. And so in Boston, we have more demand that we know what to do with because it's just so hard to get a contractor to even come to give you an estimate. That's very different from some other markets where you have a lot of people who can get licensed and who can start a business and they're just looking for work.

And is that a function of regulation in Boston? Is it immigration? Boston is been one of the hotter housing markets in the past few years. So is it related to that?

It's a good question. It's probably a mix of those things. Certainly there's a lot of demand. If you think of the Boston suburbs, places like Cambridge or Newton, there are a lot of young families with a bit of capital who are investing a lot in homes, and maybe supply hasn't caught up. It's also a function of what it takes to get licensed and to start your business to deal with permits. There is a labor shortage across the board in Boston, skilled on scale at every level. That's really hard as well.

Yeah, fascinating. You noticed when you looked at your demand metrics, so you can see you've more demand than you can fill in Boston. Are there other side, so if we look at the housing markets, Austin and Tampa or Western Florida stick out as much weaker housing markets post pandemic. The Sunbelt in general has been much slower. Do you notice any parallels in remodel?

That's a good question. We don't do much work in the Sunbelt yet.

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We wouldn't have seen it in our business. A lot of our work is on the coast and in the Midwest around Chicago. I'm trying to think. You get places like San Francisco, which is a really fascinating market. What's interesting about San Francisco is at the higher end, you have a lot of people building ADUs, auxiliary dwelling units, so a whole other smaller house in their backyards. There are a lot of incentives for that. People building additions. There's a lot of demand, and then also great supply for that. Then there's the lower end of the market, a lot of which is done actually in an unpermitted way, and that's in part because regulations in San Francisco are so stringent. If we're a 20, $25,000 project for our contractors, it's actually harder to compete because we require them to do everything above board. But the competition is there's so much below board, but in part that's because the regulations are so demanding. I mean, I've never seen a market like San Francisco when it comes to renovating. So every market's different. Okay,

Okay. That's really fascinating. And San Francisco per se, city of San Francisco still has a lot of weakness in home prices, especially in condos over the last few years. But at the high end, there's a lot of cash. And so those kinds of things are still underway. And I imagine there's a lot of renovation that happens in that world as well.

There definitely is. Yep.

Great. So tell us what's coming up for Block and what's on the horizon?

Yeah, a couple of things. So we're continuing to open up new markets. We open up new markets about every six months, so we're just planning that for 2025. That's one focus. The other area of focus is continuing to build out our AI tools specifically for what we call planning. And that's this notion of this entire journey of designing your space, figuring out your budget, really getting ready to go and talk to contractors. That space is, we call it planning as a simplification. That space takes months, sometimes years for people. As you mentioned, sometimes folks start to think about renovating. Maybe for you it was quicker. You just found your contractor, it was your neighbor's recommendation. But sometimes folks start to think about renovating and then they get overwhelmed and they stop. Then they come back three months later and they really don't know where to start and they stop. We want to make that so much easier and transparent and more straightforward. So there's a lot of focus there.

It took me 10 years to finally pull the trigger on my bathroom, so

That's right. If we hear that story so much, people will say, oh, I saw that blue bathroom on your Instagram. I've been thinking about it for three years. For

Three years.

Yeah.

Great. Well, in a world where you start filling things in online and building the systems, that makes a lot of sense to me. I think we can make the process more efficient for folks and getting better outcomes seems like a good thing in the world.

That's the hope.

Alright, terrific. Julie k Fitz Block Renovation. Thank you so much for your time today. It was nice talking, nice learning about what you're doing and spending some time with your ideas on remodeling and renovation and some of the AI things you're working on.

It was a pleasure. Thank you for having me, Mike.

Alright everybody, this is a top of mind podcast. Thanks for paying attention and if you enjoyed the conversations like one with Julie, Julie, I always appreciate a big five star review wherever you get your podcast and we will have more very soon. Thanks everybody