Owning a house.

[turnipmonster]

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I thought that data was supposed to read as: for every dollar spent, you get 90 cents back.

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that's exactly what it reads. keep in mind is the data is the national average. like most averages, it is probably not composed of 2 million americans all getting 90 cents on the dollar for all their renovations. it seems more likely that most people are paying too much for renovations, some people are getting a good price (paying too little) and others are breaking even with the averages.

obviously I don't know the distribution, but it looks to me like it's quite possible to make +EV investments regarding renovations, because the distribution that puts the national average at 90% that also has all the data points below 100% seems very unlikely.

agree, or disagree?

I don't want to come across as rabidly defending home improvements as a great investing strategy, because it's obviously not, but intuitively it seems obvious to me that home improvements can be +EV and all the data posted so far seems to bear that out, if you buy my assumption regarding the distrubution.