Home Maintenance Costs Almost Double in a Year

Home maintenance almost doubled over last year as Americans continue to battle inflation. It's another blow to homeowners who also struggle against high mortgage rates and housing prices.

It costs Americans about $10,000 a year to maintain their homes, according to a survey from the digital home maintenance platform Honey Homes, almost double what homeowners paid on average for maintenance last year. Homeowners said they paid about $6,000 on home repairs in 2022, according to a Hippo survey.

A jump in prices for services is causing sticker shock when homeowners have to fix things in their homes while high inflation is making companies more selective in the kinds of jobs that they take on, Honey Homes Chief Executive Officer Vishwas Prabhakara told Newsweek in an interview.

"The home services industry, those workers and those small businesses are often under the same inflationary pressures as every business out there," Prabhakara said. "What you actually find oftentimes is a lot of vendors that used to do both installation and maintenance of things around the home are actually saying the maintenance is actually not worth our time anymore."

That reality is leading to a more expensive upkeep of homes as owners sometimes choose to delay taking care of things than then end up costing even more when it becomes necessary to call in a repair person, Prabhakara said.

"As a result, your stuff breaks down more often and basically you end up spending more money on the repairs versus the maintenance," he told Newsweek. "In addition, because it's more expensive to roll a truck out to your home, you have vendors quoting crazy prices just to make sure it makes sense for them."

Inflation skyrocketed over the past year to 9 percent, the highest in four decades, which sparked interest rate hikes from Federal Reserve to a two-decade high.

High Upkeep Costs Sour Experience

For owners, expensive upkeep of their houses is making the experience of buying a home less pleasant than it could be, Prabhakara said.

"When you buy a home, you have all these hopes and dreams of what this place will mean to your family and I think what happens to most people is they quickly get subsumed by the stress, the time investment and the cost of maintaining their home," he pointed out.

Prabhakara said it comes down to inflation and as homeowners are finding that when they do decide to invest in fixing up their properties, what they may have budgeted for that does not go as far.

"People are maybe spending a similar amount of dollars or more, but they're getting less for their money," he told Newsweek.

The Honey Homes survey was conducted in October and had a sample of 1,000 homeowners, the company said.

Prabhakara believes high mortgage rates will leave homeowners reluctant to move, so they are forced to pay for maintenance. He said services like his could help homeowners reduce these costs.

"Prices are going to keep going up in the industry at large. I think solutions like Honey Homes start making a lot more sense for people once they realize that reality," Prabhakara argued.