The Renovation Premium: Where Renovated Homes Command the Largest Price Gap

Across the markets we measured, renovated homes generally command a premium over fixer inventory. The question that matters is how much more, and where.

We measured it from closed sales, and this is the second edition of the answer. The first edition of this study selected each metro by the postal city on the sale record, which quietly mixes municipalities: Birmingham mail covers Mountain Brook and Vestavia Hills, which are separate and far wealthier cities. This edition draws every metro at its actual city limits, using the Census municipal boundary and each sale's own coordinates, and the ranking changed enough that we are publishing the correction rather than quietly editing numbers.

The headline

Across 1,784,956 closed sales inside the city limits of 1,674 U.S. cities over the 365 days ending August 22, 2026, we classified listings as renovated or unrenovated from their own descriptions and compared median price per square foot within each city. In the 191 metros with at least 50 classified sales on each side, the median renovation premium across metros is 45.1 percent.

That national figure is the boring part. The range is the story: from 264.9 percent in Pittsburgh to 0.3 percent in Des Plaines, Illinois.

Where the gap is widest

Pittsburgh takes the top spot from Birmingham, and the reason is instructive: the first edition measured postal Birmingham, whose suburban renovated stock inflated the gap to 258 percent. Inside Birmingham's city limits the premium is 241.1 percent, still enormous, still second in the country. Pittsburgh's 264.9 percent rests on 892 renovated and 143 unrenovated closings inside the city proper, where renovated stock sells for $184.82 per square foot against $50.65 for unrenovated.

The pattern behind the whole table is the same one the first edition found: legacy industrial metros with old housing stock, where an unrenovated house can trade near land value while finished stock sells at three to four times its price per square foot.

Where renovating barely registers

In fast-growing, newer-stock markets, "unrenovated" still means livable, so the gap collapses. Des Plaines' renovated and unrenovated medians differ by less than one percent.

Read the number for what it is

A 200 percent gap is not the return on renovating a normal house. It is the spread between distressed, often gutted stock and finished stock. The unrenovated side of these medians is dominated by houses described with words like as-is, handyman, and cash only. If you buy a sound house and remodel the kitchen, your outcome lives nowhere near these numbers. What the spread does measure is the repricing power of condition in each market, which is exactly what a flipper or a lender underwriting a rehab loan needs to compare across cities.

What changed from the first edition, precisely

Three things, all disclosed: the geography (Census city-limits polygons instead of postal city names; postal sampling mixed municipalities and both inflated and compressed premiums depending on the suburb mix), the qualification rule (at least 50 classified sales in each bucket, which is what the first edition's tables actually exhibited; a looser reading produces degenerate entries built on single-sale buckets), and the window (365 days ending August 22, 2026). The first edition's median across metros of 36.5 percent across 215 postal metros becomes 45.1 percent across 191 city-limits metros, and eight of the first edition's top ten remain in this edition's top ten.

Methodology

Closed sales from the Resideline corpus, 365 days ending August 22, 2026, filtered to each city's Census municipal boundary by per-sale coordinates. Renovation status is classified from listing descriptions (renovated, remodeled, updated throughout, versus as-is, fixer, needs work, handyman and similar; ambiguous listings are excluded rather than guessed). Price per square foot uses living area only, with sanity bounds on size and price. A metro qualifies with at least 400 in-boundary closings, at least 300 usable descriptions, and at least 50 classified sales in each bucket. Premium = median renovated $/sqft over median unrenovated $/sqft, minus one. Medians, never means, so single trophy sales cannot move a city's number.