First consultation appointment with the prefabricated house manufacturer

As a rule, the client wishes for more qualified information than just a final sum as a rough figure. Floor area times height times cubic meter price is quickly typed in. The result is shocked faces and helplessness about how the sum came about and how to "healthily shrink" it. Undoing that takes several times longer.

And for naive wishful-thinking-I-have-no-idea people, that is enough to bring some back down to earth.

A daycare center was supposed to be built here, but nobody applied for it.

If there were no bidders at all, in my experience, it usually comes down to idiotic requirements in the tender that cannot be met.

For example, proving when applying for such contracts that (EU-wide!) no taxes or social contributions have been evaded in the last x years, etc. — gathering these certificates of good conduct (and having them officially translated, hehe) takes time. Plus long lists of references and the like. For a daycare group, you can earn about as much as for a semi-detached house, but the standards to be observed fill as many folders as for a nursing home. Only specialists then torture themselves with that, and they in turn only take on such troublemakers as municipal administrations (or hypocritical church sponsors) as clients if they otherwise would have gaps in their order books.

...so basically, my concern is to know whether I can expect a prefab house manufacturer to design a floor plan for me (of course, it would be nice to see the whole thing in 3D) and to advise me comprehensively before I have to sign a preliminary contract?

I think the question has been answered.

However, I don’t quite understand the problem. There are floor plans upon floor plans. The individual house design for yourselves takes time. It’s not just something whipped up out of thin air within an hour. It develops over weeks – and you’re apparently not willing to wait for that either. What comes out in an hour is what already lies in their drawer as a standard model house and was presented to you. That can be very well used as a basis for calculation. Every home builder offers a 160 sqm city villa, a 120 sqm semi-detached house, a 114 sqm bungalow, and a 140 sqm gable roof house. With standard specification, you can plan well and determine, for example, that Weberhaus is too expensive and Scanhaus Marlow Marlow is too cheap for you. Or that you need an extension for a 5th room. That way, you bring the construction matter to the point... later comes the construction service description, but that is another topic. The gut feeling about the provider also comes into play.

But going deep into the house design is, in my opinion, going too far when nothing is settled yet. This involves work costing a higher four- to five-figure sum, as an argument about a purchase of around €250,000. I think you underestimate this service.

We actually only came across all the prefab house providers because I like timber construction and all the providers advertise how flexible everything is. But actually, we don’t want a house from a catalog. Then for us, the question will really arise whether we might get along better with a regional general contractor.

A regional general contractor will also have their model houses with which they calculate. (As an architect, often only a draftsman is employed who nicely draws everything in his 38-hour week. The architect may work on an hourly fee basis, but only for the GC, and that too hourly. For one house, he has so many hours available... this calculation has to be paid by someone.)

There is the basic execution version with the GC which costs such and such, the better one such and such. The builder sniffs out their financial limit. Both nationwide and regional. The company Heinz von Heiden all over Germany as well as the small one in the north of Hamburg.

And honestly: the performance of the home builder company is not assessed by the design/floor plan/3D visualization but by completely different things (gut feeling, construction service description, good reputation, quality, etc.). A good floor plan can if necessary also be achieved by detours (architect and then GC); it’s not only good because there’s 3D.

What you want is the service of an architect who sees you personally as a client. He can also plan in prefabricated construction and look for a BU who will later implement the house.

Getting quotes has become a kind of popular sport. There are (unfortunately not rarely) people who just want to know what their dream house costs, who have no plot yet (or don’t know what a development plan is and how to read it and whether it is even possible there). Even some who haven’t had a conversation about what loan volume they can manage. Just because a serious interested party “hides” among a handful of dreamers, would you really write everyone a quote?

That’s how it is.

And never misjudge the seller! You can both over- and underestimate them.

I am annoyed by some posts and perceive them as conveying prejudices. In my professional life, I have expanded a daycare center, completely renovated a kindergarten, and built a nursery. Not by myself, but with the help of architects and construction advice from the youth welfare office, and I was responsible for the costs. We did not have exaggerated demands in the tender text, had no problems finding bidders, were neither querulous nor hypocritical, and paid the invoices within four weeks after the architects' approval. However, we insisted on rectifying defects. But we did not look for defects. Having defects remedied is our rightful claim, I think. Karsten

I am annoyed by some posts

Having things fixed is naturally a legitimate right. By querulous I meant that city administrations & co. are like princesses on a pea, and the contractor with what are essentially minor questions in the bureaucratic operation is certainly no less allowed to play the bookbinder Wanninger than the citizen. And by hypocritical, that church-influenced clients like to deliver pious speeches, but as clients are just as gladly sly foxes – not one bit more Christian than the evil free market.

The tender texts themselves may be reasonable, but the special regulations to be observed for daycares stand in an unfavorable ratio to the supposed profit of the construction contractor, who earns more on a private semi-detached house than on a two-group daycare center.

With a small health insurance fund (actually not an authority, but behaved like one) I thankfully declined to be offered a consulting mandate – they had completely market-remote ideas about how exposed one would have to get for it. Some oddities of the EU tender culture seem hardly compatible with data protection to me.

From experiences like these (mostly my own), a public client would not get an appointment from me for a hundred years. Which I do not mean against the employees, I myself earn my living.

About the daycare centers and special regulations. Surely they exist. But isn't that rather the problem of the architect hired by the client? The tender text then contains these special small toilets instead of standard ceramics, instead of normal toilet partitions those with extra finger pinch protection, instead of laminate/PVC linoleum. Instead of one front door, two, fire protection, escape route... The contractor then prices accordingly. Building a nursery with group room, sleeping room, small kitchen, hallway, cloakroom, children's WC, and staff WC cost 300,000 euros in 2010. In 2010, you could have gotten two small solid houses for that. Why should the companies have earned less?