From Vigo to the U.S.; a Galician founder tackles a $400 billion renovation problem

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The renovation industry in the United States has a problem - and it starts before the first hammer hits.

Every year, Americans spend more than $400 billion on home renovations, making it one of the largest segments of the residential real estate market. Yet despite its scale, pricing remains one of its least transparent components.

After years of working closely with construction, real estate, and investment dynamics - and gaining perspective through extensive travel across different continents and markets - Carla Alonso identified a structural gap in how renovation projects are priced in the United States.

Most projects begin with a number that feels reasonable:

- A kitchen renovation: $40,000

- A full-home update: $150,000

- A bathroom remodel: $25,000

But those numbers are often not real estimates. They are placeholders - shaped by generic benchmarks, contractor ballparks, or outdated online averages. What is missing is context. And in renovation, context is everything.

Two projects that look nearly identical on paper can end up with dramatically different costs depending on variables that are often invisible at the start:

- Labor demand at the ZIP-code level

- Permitting complexity and local regulations

- Hidden structural conditions

- Scope changes during demolition

- Material availability and quality

- Electrical, plumbing, or HVAC upgrades

This is why a renovation budget can move from $50,000 to $80,000 without any visible change in the project itself. In reality, the project did change - not in design, but in information. And that gap is where most of the industry's inefficiency originates.

A founder bringing a new layer of intelligence to the U.S. market

Carla Alonso, a 27-year-old founder from A Salgueira, Vigo (Spain), is building a solution to this problem through Hathor Technologies Group, Inc., a Delaware C Corporation focused on construction cost intelligence.

With hands-on exposure to construction processes, real estate dynamics, and investment decision-making - combined with an international perspective gained from observing different markets - Alonso identified a recurring structural issue: renovation decisions were being made based on incomplete and fragmented information.

"The issue isn't construction," Alonso explains. "It's that the first number people use to make decisions is often structurally wrong."

That insight led her to bring a new approach to the U.S. market - one focused on improving how renovation decisions are made before a project begins.

Early signals across major U.S. markets

Based on early datasets and market analysis across multiple U.S. cities, including Miami, Texas metro areas, New York, and California markets, Hathor AI has started identifying consistent patterns in how renovation costs behave.

The system is being trained on real project data, combining historical renovation cases, local market conditions, and cost behavior patterns across different regions. Projects initially estimated using generic benchmarks tend to significantly diverge from actual costs once local variables are properly accounted for.

In early analyzed cases, renovation estimates initially set around $60,000 were adjusted to over $80,000 after incorporating local variables and hidden constraints - reflecting gaps of more than 25-30% between initial assumptions and reality.

Across multiple scenarios, similar deviations have been observed, particularly in markets with high regulatory friction or volatile labor demand.

By integrating localized data, project constraints, and real market signals, the platform is able to align cost expectations closer to real execution outcomes - reducing the gap between initial estimates and final project costs.

An industry-wide information problem

What many homeowners describe as "budget overruns" are, in reality, the delayed discovery of missing information.

This affects the entire ecosystem:

-Homeowners make financial decisions with incomplete data

-Investors misprice acquisitions and renovation assumptions

-Contractors spend time correcting expectations instead of executing

In most industries, pricing is supported by structured historical data and benchmarking systems. In renovation, that layer is still fragmented.

Relevant data exists - in permits, past projects, contractor expertise, and local market dynamics - but it is rarely aggregated into something decision-ready. As a result, each renovation effectively starts from scratch.

Building a platform for renovation cost intelligence

Through Hathor AI, the company is building a data-driven platform designed to provide cost intelligence before renovation decisions are made.

The product is being developed as a digital decision layer for homeowners, investors, and real estate operators - enabling them to evaluate renovation costs with greater accuracy before committing capital.

Instead of relying on single-point estimates, the system delivers:

- Realistic cost ranges based on comparable projects

- Structured breakdowns across cost categories

- Confidence levels tied to data availability and local market conditions

The goal is not to replace contractors, but to improve the starting point of every renovation project, because in renovation, the first decision is not design, it is budget. And when that number is wrong, everything that follows - financing, timelines, contractor alignment, and final outcomes - becomes significantly more complex.

A shift that could redefine the market

The U.S. renovation sector does not simply face an execution challenge. It faces an information problem.

And solving that problem could fundamentally reshape how renovation projects are planned, priced, and approved. Companies that successfully build this layer of cost intelligence will not only reduce inefficiencies - they will redefine how decisions are made across one of the largest markets in real estate.

About the founder

Carla Alonso is the founder of Hathor Technologies Group, Inc., a Delaware C Corporation building AI-powered renovation cost intelligence for the U.S. housing market.

Learn more: www.hathortech.es [https://hathortech.es/]
Media Contact
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Website: https://hathortech.es/

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