• Best Guess Cover artist Mike Right has represented a different city in each letter of “Top 100 Markets.” Guess them all correctly and you could win a Bosch compound miter saw. Click here for the official rules and entry form.

    Credit: Mike Right

    Best Guess Cover artist Mike Right has represented a different city in each letter of “Top 100 Markets.” Guess them all correctly and you could win a Bosch compound miter saw. Click here for the official rules and entry form.

Our second annual forecast of the 100 U.S. markets that will be most active in 2012 is based, as was the inaugural list, on the Residential Remodeling Index, or RRI. The good news: more than three-quarters of the cities on the list are over 80% of the way back to their 2007 levels of remodeling activity. The bad news: regardless of location, the forecast is for slow growth through most of 2012.

If your city is on the list, you’re probably doing better than most. But even if it’s not listed, it helps to remember that all remodeling is local, and that certain neighborhoods are likely to perform better than others in any given market. Our profiles of the 20 best-performing markets provide some insight into the factors that are influencing the depth, breadth, and speed of the recovery.

Click here to see the Top 100 Markets of 2011.

Quarterly Updates of the RRI

Quarterly updates of the RRI will appear in the Dashboard department of the magazine as well as online. For remod­elers looking for deeper insight into a market or for more information on the consumer demand for specific categ­ories of remodeling projects, Hanley Wood Market Intelligence offers a local report for each of the MSAs. Get more information on the RRI reports at http://go.hw.net/r-rri and at http://go.hw.net/r-buyrri