Home Care and Maintenance Services

The 2020 HIRI Prod­uct Pur­chase Track Sur­vey (PPTS) is now avail­able to mem­bers. The sur­vey looks at trends in home improve­ment prod­uct and ser­vice pur­chas­es based on data pro­vid­ed bien­ni­al­ly from home­own­ers across the Unit­ed States.

This lat­est report cov­ers 14 prod­uct cat­e­gories, 238 indi­vid­ual prod­ucts, 18 types of projects and 23 ser­vices, all pur­chased over the course of 2019 and ana­lyzed in 2020.

For home care and main­te­nance ser­vice providers, the most inter­est­ing infor­ma­tion may come from the ser­vice cat­e­go­ry, which cov­ers what ser­vices were pur­chased, why they were hired and how cus­tomers found ser­vice providers.

Of the home­own­ers sur­veyed, 58% report mak­ing a home improve­ment ser­vice pur­chase in 2019. The top five cat­e­gories were:

• Lawn & land­scap­ing services
• Pest & insect control
• HVAC repair & maintenance
• Plumb­ing repair
• Handy­man services

The report pro­vides details on aver­age spend, fre­quen­cy of pur­chase and buy­er demo­graph­ics. Here, we’re going to look at the top five cat­e­gories and the basics of how pur­chase deci­sions were made.

Lawn & Landscaping Services

Lawn & land­scap­ing ser­vices is, once again, the most pop­u­lar home care and main­te­nance ser­vice pur­chased, with 18.6% of home­own­ers report­ing that they hired a lawn and land­scap­ing pro­fes­sion­al in 2019.

Lawn and land­scap­ing ser­vices are among the most afford­able ser­vices in our sur­vey, and while home­own­ers spend, on aver­age, $590 annu­al­ly, that spend is spread out over an aver­age of 8.9 pur­chas­es, mak­ing each pur­chase just over $66.

Qual­i­ty and con­ve­nience were big fac­tors when mak­ing lawn & land­scap­ing pur­chase deci­sions. Home­own­ers hired ser­vice providers because they either couldn’t do the work them­selves (30%), felt they would get bet­ter results (29%) or to avoid the work entire­ly (22%).

As to how the ser­vice was found, rec­om­men­da­tions made up the major­i­ty of the refer­rals at 53%. Home­own­ers relied on sug­ges­tions from friends, neigh­bors and fam­i­ly to help them make their decisions.

Pest & Insect Control

Pest and insect con­trol was the sec­ond most com­mon ser­vice pur­chased, with 13.5% of home­own­ers buy­ing in 2019. On aver­age, those home­own­ers spent $295 on pest and insect con­trol, usu­al­ly over an aver­age of 3.1 pur­chas­es. This puts the aver­age sin­gle pur­chase at about $95.

Con­ve­nience and exper­tise were the pri­ma­ry rea­sons for hir­ing pest and insect con­trol ser­vices, with 44% of home­own­ers hir­ing some­one to avoid work, while 32% made the deci­sion because they couldn’t do the work them­selves.

The ways ser­vice providers were cho­sen was a lit­tle more var­ied than oth­er cat­e­gories. The most com­mon refer­ral source was per­son­al rec­om­men­da­tions, but only 39% of home­own­ers report­ed mak­ing a hir­ing deci­sion based on this source.

HVAC Repair & Maintenance

HVAC repair and main­te­nance was one of the more lucra­tive ser­vice offer­ings, with the aver­age annu­al spend among home­own­ers reach­ing $812 over 1.4 pur­chas­es. Of the home­own­ers sur­veyed, 13.2% report­ed hir­ing HVAC repair and main­te­nance pro­fes­sion­als in 2019.

As a more tech­ni­cal ser­vice, most home­own­ers (71%) chose to hire some­one because they were unable to do the work them­selves or because they felt hir­ing some­one would yield bet­ter results (15%).

As with most home improve­ment ser­vices in the study, rec­om­men­da­tions account­ed for a large por­tion of the way peo­ple found HVAC repair & main­te­nance ser­vices, with 36% of home­own­ers say­ing it was their pri­ma­ry source. Unlike oth­er ser­vices how­ev­er, war­ran­ty require­ments made up a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of the refer­rals too, at 13%.

Plumbing Repair

Plumb­ing repairs con­tin­ue to be a steady earn­er among the top five home care and main­te­nance ser­vices, with home­own­ers spend­ing an aver­age of $475 annu­al­ly over 1.3 purchases.

Sim­i­lar to HVAC repair and main­te­nance, home­own­ers hired plumb­ing repair pro­fes­sions most often because 63% felt they wouldn’t be able to do the work them­selves or that the results would be bet­ter (16%) if they were done by a pro­fes­sion­al.

Inter­est­ing­ly enough, in this cat­e­go­ry, while rec­om­men­da­tions were the most com­mon way (49%) for home­own­ers to find a ser­vice provider, this is the one of only two cat­e­gories in the top five where online refer­rals also made an appear­ance, with 11% of respon­dents say­ing it was how they found a plumb­ing professional.

Handyman Services

Handy­man ser­vices include a vari­ety of inte­ri­or and exte­ri­or home improve­ment projects and came in as the fifth most com­mon ser­vice pur­chased, with 12.3% of home­own­ers say­ing they hired a handy­man in 2019.

The aver­age annu­al spend for handy­man ser­vices was $532 over 1.8 pur­chas­es, mak­ing the aver­age ser­vice call spend about $295.

A qual­i­ty handy­man goes a long way, and that’s what moti­vat­ed home­own­ers to hire some­one, with 58% report­ing they couldn’t do the work them­selves, while a fur­ther 18% felt they would get bet­ter results.

Handy­man ser­vices, like the oth­er home care and main­te­nance cat­e­gories dis­cussed here, most often get hired based on rec­om­men­da­tions (58%), but here too, online search­es are becom­ing increas­ing­ly pop­u­lar with 12% of respon­dents say­ing it was how they found a handyman.

For Further Information

More details on who is hir­ing in these ser­vice cat­e­gories, as well as in 18 oth­ers, is avail­able in the com­plete report, avail­able only to HIRI mem­bers through our web­site.

If you’re inter­est­ed in becom­ing a mem­ber to gain access to this, and many oth­er reports, click here for more information