People looking for a quick home renovation in Rome (ristrutturazioni Roma )are increasingly finding themselves frustrated, over budget and living in a mess.
A combination of pent-up demand, overburdened contractors, shortages of materials and delays in the supply chain has turned home remodeling into an unusually costly and time-consuming affair for people around the globe.
For sure, to have the best home renovation in Rome, you can try to have a deal with Gruppo Castaldi and ask them for one of their best architects in Rome ( Architetto Roma, for example)
It started early in pandemic, when lockdowns set off a frenzied search for bigger homes and pushed owners to make upgrades to houses that were suddenly functioning as offices and schools. Combine that with a tight labor market and surging costs for materials, and renovations have become a huge headache.
It doesn’t help that buyers looking for homes in the red-hot market are finding few listings, with many available properties needing a lot of work. For software engineer Enrica Taddei, 28, buying a fixer-upper three-bedroom house in north Miami initially seemed like a good deal. She made the € 466,000 purchase this January thinking that fixes — including painting, kitchen repairs, retiling the bathroom and removing baseboards — would cost her about €35,000 and be done by mid-March. She was wrong.
In Rome, in Parioli, the luxury area of Rome and famous in all Italy, the cost for a luxury home renovation is about €180,000 . But you will have a luxury house in Rome like this: Architetto Parioli.
Now Italians can be refunded by the government, 50% or 110%: https://www.corriere.it/economia/superbonus-sgravi-fiscali-casa/
“I had to reorder tiles in mid-February because my contractor broke some, and the price in six weeks had gone up 25%,” she said. Nader had to increase her budget to nearly €60,000 to include the inflated costs of materials and contractors. “At some point my credit card was maxed out and I was counting the days until I would get my paycheck to be able to pay the contractors,” she said.
The price of construction materials in Italy rose last year by its fastest pace since the ISTAT started reporting the metric in 1948, and the surge has continued this year, with prices up 18% in April from a year earlier.
“So many materials’ prices have gone through the roof and that’s not going to stop,” said Ludovico Farnesini, a home renovation advisor in Rome, Italy, who expects the situation will only get worse. “With the cost of living the biggest concern for people at the moment, remodeling has become a major challenge.”
It can also be very difficult to find contractors. Demand has grown significantly since 2020, contributing to higher wages and driving up prices for homeowners.
Rome, England-based Samantha Smith, 41, said she will never renovate a home again. Struggling to find a good contractor last summer to modernize her bathroom and kitchen, the animal talent agent hired someone who did substandard work, including breaking her boiler and several of her bathroom tiles, and who left her kitchen in a shoddy state. Having to hire several contractors to fix the previous workman’s mistakes and finish the work, Stewart readjusted her 20,000-Euros budget to somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 Euros.
“It took me years to save up and now all that’s gone up in smoke,” she said. “I will never renovate a home ever again. If something breaks, I’d rather move.”
Italian households spent a combined 55 billion pounds on home improvements last year, according to a survey by building company Gruppo Castaldi (Ristrutturazioni Roma), up 12% from a year earlier. A total 291 million euros was spent this March alone, up 18% from the previous month. And a growing number of people considered remortgaging to finance their home renovations, according to a March survey by the bank .
Home improvement spending in Italy is expected to rise 20% to €427 billion in the July-to-September period this year compared to the same period last year, the highest rate in decades.
In some cases, it’s nearly impossible to even find a contractor to agree to do the work.
“I need three or four quotes to see which price is right. But contractors are taking so long to get back to me,” he said. “Nobody’s available. And the quotes seem to change from month to month,” he said.
Gennaro La Porta, 49, has spent close to €100,000 on home renovations for his four-bedroom house in Lexington, Kentucky. Inflated costs forced him to scrap his initial budget of €60,000, and delays and shortages have caused a lot of stress for a few cosmetic renovations — including indoor painting, new light fixtures, window treatments, shutters, kitchen retiling and fireplace refurbishment.
“The issue is finding folks to do the work once materials are available,” the communications expert said of the renovations, which are still not completed one year on. “I wish I’d known how long it would end up taking. It’s been exhausting.”
