Building a house - where to start?

If you get a house for that? Usually, you still have to do a lot there - so plan time/money accordingly.

Hello Ralf,

sometimes the world really is a village

I am a bit desperate right now. My girlfriend and I would like to build a house, but we don’t understand it and don’t know where to start. You find a thousand answers, but the questions are always different.

For initial information, you should carefully read through here. Many users have posted their experiences on the way to building a house - or not. We try to filter out the fakes from the real users, so I can assume that the experience published here mostly corresponds to the truth; exceptions also confirm the rule here.

For us, it looks like we are looking for a provider who basically offers everything from one source. Plot with house construction and everything that belongs around it like insurances, ancillary costs, etc.

That will not work, unless you buy only after the house has been built; most builders, however, would like a few euros in advance... to be paid according to construction progress.

We would like to build a ready-to-move-in house with about 100-120m² living space as well as a small garden. Otherwise, we have no further requirements.

The little house with 113 sqm on a concrete slab already costs you EUR 170,000 in the turnkey variant; in addition, there are ancillary construction costs of EUR 35,000-40,000, costs for painting and flooring, the essentials of outdoor facilities, as well as the plot itself. Assuming you manage to get a plot in the Auenfeld (to my knowledge, there are only semi-detached house plots left there), you have to reckon with €195.00/sqm. With a reasonable plot size of about 350 sqm, that’s around EUR 68,300 but in total sum you already end up at EUR 303,300. And then you haven’t budgeted any nice-to-haves yet!

Our total budget is €205,000. Whether it’s a bungalow is initially secondary.

The budget is too low, as I explained in the previous paragraph. By the way, a bungalow of comparable size costs you around EUR 28,000 more.

Thanks for the feedback. We had looked for providers offering prefab houses.

Quality prefab houses are neither cheaper nor quicker to move into

We last ran the budget through Interhyp with an advisor...

I see 3 options, of which I would like to guide you with the latter two.

1. You go to another financing advisor (I can help you with this if you want) and discuss with him the possibilities available to you. The decisive factor is less the interest rate than the installment you can afford without having to subordinate your life to the dream of building a house.

2. You save for a few more years and see what will be possible, what the market offers. I guess that not a few houses - comparatively young houses - will be available cheaply in 5/6 years at the latest.

3. You look around the Jüchen region for existing properties. From my point of view, and if it absolutely “has to” be a house at the current time, this is the most economically sound decision. But you should never buy just by appearance here, always invest money in an expert who inspects the object of desire with you. Because one thing is certain: in the budget range in which you are moving, the offered properties will certainly have a catch that will cost you quite some euros at the end of the day. It’s good to know how much “quite some euros” means as a number

Rhineland regards

with 205,000 plus or minus you won't get far, not even here in the northeast. The advertisements always look so super attractive and even if a construction project with land is offered to you, expect additional costs or compromises on the house. (where hardly any compromises are possible at that price) I can currently follow it live in my construction area, what the GUs promise flatly does not in any way fit the development plan --> additional costs, if it is even approvable

I'm about to leave, but take a look at Immonet etc to get a feeling for how much house you can get for how many euros where you are. There are also offers from developers there, but the final prices are never listed in the offers, rather bait offers without special equipment or with only basic equipment.

With the total budget, I would also buy after an appraiser has looked at it carefully. In the existing property, there are also things like paving, garden, terrace, shed, etc., which are often not properly planned for in new construction - and cost a lot. You can always change/replace them later when there is money.

What use are statistics that you can only see for money...?

ah very I'll write out 1-2 data points All data writing is a bit tedious Construction price single-family house, 2013 NRW 1345 Euro/ sqm Average living area (own home) West 151 sqm, East 131 sqm Federal territory total, construction costs single-family house 2007 West 1344 Euro/ sqm, East 1232 Euro/ sqm Price increase 2007 to 2014 according to construction price index approx. 15 %