West Shore Home, a national home remodeling business, recently opened its first Connecticut location after reports have shown that the Hartford area is one of the hottest housing markets in the country.
The business, which specializes in bathrooms, windows, floors and doors, has expanded nationwide since its founding as a small window and door remodeling company in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania in 2006, and has grown into a $1 billion national remodeler with more than 3,000 employees in 32 states and 44 markets. This is the company’s third location in New England. Two West Shore Home locations opened in Massachusetts earlier this year.
Jason Tutich, divisional vice president for West Shore Home’s New England region, said the company was attracted to the Hartford market in particular after learning that 72% percent of its housing market was built before 1970.
“There are lots of people there with houses that are in need of some repairs in need of some updates. It’s a perfect place for West Shore Home to expand,” Tutich said.
The company, which opened this week at 75 Brainard Road in Hartford, has plans to make its first installation by the end of the month. Tutich said the company is looking to hire between 60 and 100 employees at the Hartford location.
“Typically, home remodeling companies have a sales staff and then they subcontract out most of the installation and the operation side of their business,” Tutich said. “At West Shore Home, everybody that touches anything that says West Shore Home is a W-2 employee. I think the customers for the last 20 years have resonated with us being able to have our own employees, train them ourselves and put them on specific jobs and make them specialized in what they do.”
West Shore Home is a $1B national remodeler with more than 3,000 employees in 32 states and 44 markets.
Hot market
Last month, Realtor.com released its June hottest markets report and Hartford was ranked No. 1. Hartford also topped the list of Zillow’s Hottest Housing Markets for 2026.
According to Zillow, the typical home value in Hartford was $381,760 as of Oct. 2025, and 66% of the Hartford homes sold above their asking price in 2025. Zillow also reported that there are 63% fewer homes for sale than there were pre-pandemic; only 16.5% of Hartford listings had price cuts. Hartford home values grew 4.3% in 2025, and Hartford home values are forecast to rise by 3.9% in 2026.
“There’s many reasons to come up to the New England region. If you’re a home remodeling company, this is a great place to be,” Tutich said. “The Northeast of the United States has some of the oldest homes in the country. With rising interest rates everywhere, instead of buying new homes, people are investing money into their current homes to make them nicer and more valuable. That’s obviously where any home remodeling company wants to be.”
According to Dr. Patrick Gourley, a University of New Haven economics professor, home inventory in the Hartford market and across the country is down and is becoming a big issue. Gourley noted that “people are moving regions, not just moving to upgrade their house.”
“People have always moved for two reasons: Either they’re moving regionally, where they’re moving to an entire new state or new county, they’re moving 100 miles away because of a change of work or retirement or something like that, or they move locally. They want to upgrade their home, and they decide to move down the block or 20 miles away or something like that, but they’re still staying in the same job. They still stay in the same community sometimes,” Gourley said.
“That second group just isn’t happening right now. People aren’t putting up their home for sale because they want to upgrade and move down the block or to the nicer neighborhood.” According to Gourley, that is attributed to high interest rates and if someone bought a home seven to 10 years ago and has a sub-3% mortgage, they aren’t interested in moving and having an interest rate of 6% or 7%.
“I’m not familiar specifically with West Shore Home, so I can’t speak to them specifically, but if you’re a competent contractor these days, you are raking in the cash because people aren’t looking to move to just a nicer home, they’re upgrading their existing homes,” Gourley said.
West Shore Home uses AI technology for better efficiency in delivering its service of home remodeling.
Breaking from competition
Tutich said its AI technology platforms are what set West Shore Home apart from its competition and lead to creating its own innovation center.
“We’ve invested, as a company, over $100 million into proprietary AI and data platforms. We’ve done that by having our own innovation center in St. Paul, Minnesota. We are a home remodeling company that also has basically a technology company attached to it. We’ve been able to build out tools that make it quicker, faster, and easier for homeowners to not only meet with us, but for their products to get installed into their home,” Tutich said.
“The company has outgrown everything that was available out on the market. Our owner knew that and that’s why we have the software development company because we knew that nobody could handle the size of our growth, so we had to handle it ourselves,” Tutich added. “All of our technology is completely proprietary to us. The experience that we can offer the customer driven by great AI and great technology, as well as our own employees and being trained by ourselves and knowing what we’re capable of, I think is what really separates us.”
The company developed a Hawkeye 3D scanning tool in 2023. The West Shore Home employee is able to then use the tool to point at any area of a room and build a 3D visualization right on the iPad.
“That also takes the exact measurements of everything as the customer is choosing and picking out all of the components for their new shower, their windows, their doors, everything like that,” Tutich said. “The AI technology is building it right into that platform. And then what it’s doing, it’s specifically putting the measurements in so that the ordering process can go a lot smoother. Then it can also find where all of those products might be within our networks, and it can actually give the customer an install date in real time right at the time of sale.”
Tutich said this process is more efficient than its competitors because it removes several steps from the typical process.
“At West Shore Home, all of our products, everything is proprietary to us. We’d find that throughout our network warehouses, and that’s how we can put things together a lot more quickly than any other company can,” Tutich said.