In This Article | Hochuli Design & Remodeling Team
In this article
The projects with the highest percentage return are not the ones a remodeler sells. Here is the ranking anyway.
Why a national ROI table measures a Phoenix house wrong, and what is under your floor.
Real Phoenix investment ranges for all five project types, in one table.
The four projects worth doing even though they will not pay you back.
Which projects to skip if resale is your only reason for remodeling.
Last updated September 2026
Home Renovations with the Best ROI in Phoenix | Hochuli Design & Remodeling Team
In Phoenix in 2026, the renovations with the highest percentage return at resale are small exterior replacements: a garage door, a steel entry door, stone veneer. Interior remodels return a smaller share of what you spend, and the larger the project, the smaller that share gets. That ranking is accurate. It is also the wrong ranking to use if you plan to keep living in the house.
You've put this off for years. We get it.
Most people who call us have been circling one project for a long time. Long enough that they have read a dozen ROI articles, and long enough that the reading has started to feel like a substitute for deciding. Somewhere in there the question quietly changed from "do we want this" to "can we justify this," and a percentage seemed like the thing that would settle it.
It will not settle it. But you deserve the number before anyone tries to talk you out of wanting one.
Which home renovations have the best ROI in Phoenix?
The ranking, from the people who measure it: exterior replacement projects. Zonda publishes the Cost vs. Value report every year, and in the current edition garage door replacement takes the top spot for the second year running, followed by steel entry door replacement and manufactured stone veneer. Each of those returned more than it cost. Interior remodels sit well below them, and they slide further down as the scope grows.
Not one of those top three is something we do.
I could have opened this post with a list of seven projects that conveniently happen to be the seven projects my company sells. Most remodelers do. The reason I am not going to is that you can look this up in about ninety seconds, and if the first thing I tell you does not survive ninety seconds of checking, nothing after it is worth reading either.
So take the ranking as accurate, and then notice what it measures. The report answers one question: what does this project add to the sale price of the house? That is a useful question if you are selling. If you are not selling, it is measuring something that will never happen to you.
Why do national ROI numbers not describe the Phoenix market?
Two reasons, and the second one is the one nobody tells you.
The first is arithmetic. The data covers 119 local markets, and a national figure is an average across markets that look nothing like this one. A fireplace is a selling feature in Minnesota. Here it is furniture. Nobody in Gilbert has ever bought a house for the fireplace.
The second reason is under your feet. Valley homes are built on concrete slab, with the plumbing run inside that slab and the walls carrying load. Moving a sink or a range here is not a matter of pulling up floorboards and working from below, because there is no below. The concrete gets cut, and what that costs is published on our bathroom remodel cost page rather than repeated here.
Follow the consequence through, because this is the part that matters. The same layout change costs more in Phoenix than it does in a basement market. Cost is the denominator in a return percentage. So the projects that change how a Phoenix house functions score worse on the national table precisely because they are harder to do here. The percentage is punishing the project for the thing that makes it valuable.
What do these projects cost here, and where does the return show up?
These are our published ranges for the Phoenix area, not national averages.
Hochuli project ranges, Phoenix area, 2026
Project
Phoenix range
What pushes it to the top
Where the return shows up
Kitchen
$75,000 to $200,000
Whether the layout moves
Every day, in a room you use five times a day
Bathroom
$30,000 to $200,000 and up
Whether the plumbing moves
Mornings, and in a primary suite that finally works
Whole house
$150,000 to $1 million and up
Whether walls move
The house stops fighting how you live in it
Home addition
$125,000 to $600,000 and up
Building up rather than out
Square footage, the part an appraiser measures
ADU or guest house
$150,000 to $750,000 and up
Detached new build rather than garage conversion
A second dwelling, and the flexibility it buys your family
Two things worth knowing about the direction those numbers move. Based on the past several years, we tell people to plan on 5 to 8 percent annual cost growth. Nationally, homeowner spending on improvements keeps setting records even as the growth rate slows, which the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard tracks quarterly.
There is no off-season here. We build 52 weeks a year in Phoenix, so a year of waiting is a year of cost increase with nothing on the other side of the ledger to offset it.
Which projects are worth doing even though they will not pay you back?
Four of them, and I will tell you what each one returns.
A kitchen whose layout changes
Not new counters in the old footprint. The wall that should not be there. We took out a wall of arches in a Tempe kitchen a few years ago. The homeowners had wanted them gone since they moved in, more than ten years earlier. Same house, same wall, ten years of walking past it. Nobody appraises the ten years.
A bathroom, if the plumbing is the problem
A vanity swap is a weekend. A primary bath that works is a plumbing question, and the plumbing question is the whole project. If you are weighing which pieces of a bathroom earn their keep, we went through that room by room and feature by feature separately. Decide it on paper, before demolition, because the slab has opinions.
Square footage you already own
This is the most underrated project in the Valley and it almost never appears on an ROI list, because it is too specific to measure. One of our clients had an awkward dead space under a stairway landing. It became a wine room: split face brick, redwood ceiling, racking wrapped around the whole room, including the four foot tall area under the landing that anyone else would have written off. We replaced two of the drawer fronts with custom fronts branded with the family's last name. They had no idea until the final walkthrough.
Lorrie cannot leave wasted space alone. On another kitchen she found room for a bank of drawers inside a corner that angled outward, the kind of corner everybody treats as dead. No manufacturer made the part, so we built it.
Square footage you do not own yet
An addition is the project on this list an appraiser can measure, because it adds a countable thing. Size it deliberately though, since the fixed costs of an addition do not scale down the way most people expect. Our addition and whole house pages cover scope and pricing.
Which projects should you skip if resale is your only reason?
The version of this article you may have read before recommended seven projects. Three of the seven were curb appeal, smart home features, and energy upgrades. I am taking them out, because recommending them was us pretending to be a company we are not.
Curb appeal, garage doors, front doors. These top the return ranking. Do them. Call a garage door company or a painter. Not us.
Smart home features. A thermostat you install this year is dated in four. A buyer will not pay for a doorbell camera.
Solar and HVAC. Serious work, serious value, separate trades. We coordinate them inside a remodel. We do not sell them on their own.
Windows and doors as a standalone job. Windows return less than they cost. We replace them constantly, but as part of a remodel. On one project we replaced 45 of them. And when a single new window goes into an existing wall, we repaint the whole wall rather than blending a six inch stucco patch, because a patched paint match is a phone call on a Saturday morning waiting to happen.
None of that is on our services list, and a post that tells you otherwise to keep you reading is not worth your time. If you want a second opinion on how a professional remodeler is expected to operate, NARI publishes guidance for homeowners that has nothing to do with us.
Does it make sense to remodel before you sell?
Usually not the projects on this page.
If you are listing in six months, use the percentage ranking, because for once it is the right tool. The garage door, the front door, stone veneer if the elevation suits it. Paint and landscaping are not in the report, but they cost little and they read fast.
And if the only goal is the lowest possible price, or you want hammers swinging next week with no design phase, we are not your team. I will tell you that on the first call rather than the fourth. Your expectations for your project are yours, and if they do not line up with ours, that's okay.
Buying rather than selling is a different conversation, and one we like. We will walk a property with you before you make the offer and give you a read on what the remodel would involve, so you can make that offer with your eyes open.
What returns more than the money does?
Since my first day on a construction site in 1992 I have heard about how important quality is. Quality will make or break a company. Quality is the measuring stick. Quality, quality, quality.
I don't believe in Quality.
I believe quality workmanship is the equivalent of breathing. It is non-negotiable. Nobody walks around all day reminding themselves to breathe, and nobody's success gets measured by how many deep breaths they took. It happens in the background, because it has to.
A resale percentage is the same kind of thing. Worth knowing. Worth checking. Not worth building a decision around.
In all the years since, the calls I remember have not been about appraisals. Here is one I do remember. A past client told me he had taken to just sitting at the island in his new kitchen. Not cooking. Not entertaining. Sitting there, looking at it.
There is no line on a Cost vs. Value table for that, and there never will be.
Which is the part the report itself will tell you if you read past the rankings. Zonda's own analysis says interior remodels make the most sense for people who plan to stay in the home a while. The data and the sentiment are not in conflict here. They are saying the same thing in two different languages.
If you are selling next spring, the percentage is your answer, and it points somewhere other than us. If you are staying, the percentage was never the question. The question is how many more years you are willing to walk past that wall.
1Have a conversation, not a sales call. We work out whether the project you are describing is the project you need, and whether we are the right team for it.
2See your design and your fixed price before any work begins. That happens through a paid Project Development Agreement, where the scope, the drawings, the selections, and the price all get settled up front. It runs about five percent of the midpoint of your investment range, or $15,000 to $25,000 on larger projects needing engineering and architectural plans. It is non refundable, and it credits toward your project when you build with us.
3We build it, and you move back into a house that fits.
Some specifics about that middle step, because it is where most remodels go wrong. We do not use allowances. An allowance is a placeholder price for a decision nobody has made yet, which means the number on your remodeling agreement is not the number you pay, and that is the mechanism most surprise overruns run through. We do not carry contingency funds either, for the same reason: a pre-agreed pot for unknowns quietly removes the pressure to plan completely.
If we open a wall and find something, you get a photograph and a change order the same day, typically in the $2,000 to $5,000 range, with the revised project total on it. And if we make a mistake, we absorb it. It never becomes a change order. Ask any contractor you are considering that last question, and listen carefully to the answer.
Small exterior replacements. Garage door, steel entry door, stone veneer. They cost little and buyers respond to them on sight, which is what a high percentage return measures. Large interior remodels return a smaller percentage everywhere, including here.
Yes, and by less than it costs. The Cost vs. Value data shows the same pattern every year: the smaller the kitchen project, the higher the percentage recovered. If you are staying, the daily use is the return. If you are listing in ninety days, a targeted refresh will serve your sale price better than a full remodel.
Ours run $75,000 to $200,000, and our kitchen remodel cost page breaks down what moves a project from one end of that to the other. The single biggest driver is whether the layout moves, because moving the layout means moving plumbing that lives in a concrete slab.
More reliably than any other project here, because square footage is measurable and appraisers measure it. Size it carefully though, since the fixed costs of an addition do not scale down the way most people expect.
For most of the projects on this page, no. Sell it and let the buyer remodel to their own taste, or do the fast exterior work and price accordingly. Remodeling a kitchen to someone else's imagined preferences is the one version of this that reliably disappoints everybody.
Not as a percentage of what you spend. What you get is a house that fits how you live, on a fixed price, in a market where the alternative is buying someone else's compromise at today's prices and remodeling that instead.
Who is telling you this
Hochuli Design & Remodeling Team is a design-build remodeling firm in Scottsdale, Arizona. Scott and Lorrie Hochuli founded it in 2001 and still run it, now alongside their daughter Devan. We have completed more than 500 projects across Phoenix, Scottsdale, Paradise Valley, Tempe, Chandler, Gilbert, Mesa, and Ahwatukee, and our projects generally start at $50,000. Because we handle the drawings and the construction under one roof, what a layout change costs is something we can tell you before you commit to it rather than after.
Scott Hochuli has been remodeling Phoenix homes since 1992, is a past president of the Greater Phoenix chapter of NARI, and wrote Crush Expectations, a book about giving homeowners a remodeling experience they enjoy. Lorrie Hochuli is our lead designer and Allied ASID. The Tempe kitchen described above won NARI Contractor of the Year in 2017.
Hochuli Design & Remodeling Team, 2501 N. Hayden Rd, Suite #102, Scottsdale, AZ 85257. 602-451-0323. Arizona ROC 173428.
One team. One price. No surprises. You have a project you have been thinking about for a while. Bring us the whole thing, including the part where you are not sure it is worth it.