In an industry where many have been forecasting the wind-down of the great home nesting and renovation trend for months, the CEO of home improvement and maintenance platform Angi said on Tuesday (July 13) that while growth rates have come down since the pandemic, his company is still adding new customers and contractors on top of year-ago levels.
“I think what we’re seeing is certainly a normalization from the insanity of 2020. I don’t think we’re seeing a pullback; we’re still seeing significant homeowner demand,” Angi CEO Oisin Hanrahan said in an interview with PYMNTS. “We know that homeowners have thousands of dollars they need to spend to put into their home every year, and depending on what type of home it is, it’s like eight to 12 different things they need to get done.”
His comments come at a time when Angi has been striving to find ways to add more customers and increase its rate of repeat clients, while also creating a brisk but efficient marketplace to ensure that the company’s network of 250,000 professional contractors, cleaners, plumbers, gardeners and more are matched with good jobs that are nearby.
In fact, a report released last month by Angi’s Chief Economist Mischa Fisher pegged the company’s total addressable market at $595 billion, with a backlog of over 728 million household projects. It also showed that the home services market grew by 17 percent.
In short, the second annual economic report highlighted the fact that the 141.5 million housing units in the U.S. consist of a staggering amount of physical material that undergoes constant internal and external wear and tear. “With baby boomers aging in place and millennials taking on homeownership, we’re likely to see demand for home services continue to rise for years to come,” the report said.
But even though there’s an enormous backlog of work, Hanrahan said matching homeowners and contractors is never easy. “It’s always hard for pros to find exactly the work that they want, and for customers to find exactly the pro that they’re looking for that matches them across the four dimensions of task, location, price point and timing, and that’s where Angi excels,” he noted.
To that point, the company also just announced that it is formalizing its “Angi Key” membership program and moving it from beta-testing to a permanent feature. The new program will provide enrolled customers with a 20 percent discount on hundreds of home services for a flat annual fee of $29.99. According to the company’s announcement, the program has already amassed over 100,000 users who have collectively saved over $5 million to date.
“It makes a lot of sense for us to build a relationship with the homeowner and take care of as many of those things as possible, and really create a program where there’s value in coming back again and again and again,” Hanrahan said, calling the membership program a way to reward local customers and drive repeat service requests. The company also noted that 90 percent of the time, the membership program paid for itself with a homeowner’s first purchase.