NAHB released its state-level remodeling projections in August 2026, and the coverage has been what you’d expect. Rising home equity. Aging housing stock. Growth ahead.
All true. All fine. None of it changes what you’ll do next week.
But there is one sentence I keep thinking about near the end of the release, and I haven’t seen anyone else mention it:
“At the start of 2025, there were 128,000 remodeling firms, up from 69,000 in 2000.”
This is nearly double. And NAHB expects the remodeling sector to keep claiming a larger share of residential construction, which means that number isn’t finished climbing. More work is coming. More companies are already here.
What this looks like from the homeowner’s side
Take aging-in-place work, which NAHB specifically calls out as a growth driver. That project is almost never impulsive. Someone has been thinking about it for two years. Or an adult daughter three states away is quietly researching on her father’s behalf and hasn’t told him yet.
Before anyone picks up a phone, there are months of reading. What a curbless shower costs. Whether a 1960s ranch can take a wider doorway without moving structure. Whether you move the bedroom downstairs or install an elevator (can that even be done?).
Every one of those is a search. And a growing share of them are questions typed into ChatGPT, where the answer comes back as a short list of firms — not ten blue links, not an ad. Just a recommendation, delivered as if it came from a friend who knows the industry.
The firms in that list aren’t necessarily the best remodelers in the market. They’re the ones who wrote something worth finding.
Here’s how to find out where you stand
This takes about five minutes and requires only one query.
Open an incognito window and log out of ChatGPT. This part matters more than it sounds like. ChatGPT remembers your account history, and if you’ve ever discussed your own company in that account, it will hand your name back to you, and you’ll feel great for no reason. I’ve watched a builder celebrate results that were entirely his own conversation history reflected back at him. Clean session, or the test tells you nothing.
Then type this, the way a homeowner would, with your own market in place of mine:
Who are the best remodelers in Morgantown, WV?
Put the geography in the question itself, as that’s important, too.
Write down every firm it names, and whether you’re one of them.
Then do the part most people skip: go look at what the named firms have actually published. Not their homepage, but the specific pages that answer the specific question you just asked. That gap, between what got cited and what you’ve written, is your real to-do list.
One caveat before you draw conclusions. What you just ran tells you about ChatGPT. It doesn’t tell you about Google’s AI Overview, which is a separate system with separate results. I’ve run identical queries in both and gotten two entirely different sets of firms, with no overlap at all. So a clean result here is genuinely good news about one channel. It isn’t news about the other.
The uncomfortable part
If you’re invisible in those answers today, you’re invisible while there are 128,000 firms. NAHB is telling us that number is going up, and demand is going up with it.
Growth is coming. Whether it comes to you depends on whether homeowners in your market can find you before they decide.
If you run it and don’t like what comes back, email me and tell me what you saw — and tell me what you’d do next. That second part is the one I’m curious about. Most remodelers I talk to can spot the problem fine. It’s the “okay, so what do I actually do about it” part where things stall out.