If Amazon sold houses, they would be industry leaders within half a year.
No, hehe: I can just imagine people in my head casually ordering houses to try on and sending them back for free because they don't like the tiles after all *LOL*
You can also simply find an architect and ask him all the really pressing questions,
in this case not, because I was specifically interested in the comparison of off-the-shelf providers, i.e. I only included the solid builders insofar as they even have catalogs. I was not concerned with the architect as the "laughing third party," nor with solid construction versus timber panel, but material-independently with a cross-section of standard model providers. And in doing so, also about the quality of the information, where its usefulness counts.
The high-quality models of some prefab house providers, which are also architecturally + energetically interesting, are then already moving in price ranges that also make realization by an architect attractive again.
That's exactly how I see it, and I was never of the opinion that a prefab house has to distinguish itself by a price difference, neither in one direction nor the other. The work of an architect has value and purpose, thus also a price (whether billed separately or included in total prices). And it also has a lot to do with the specific building project, so simply copying a set of plans does not save anything on a model house. It still has to fit the plot, and that is individual case by case.
And because I see—except for the construction time—no fundamental difference, I regard prefab house manufacturers as "building contractors like any others." Many of the solid builders also have their "specifications." One may only use expanded clay, another aerated concrete, a third sand-lime brick, in my area pumice is still strong, and some only use a certain formwork stone. I see someone who says "I only build walls according to a proprietary recipe as a sandwich with a structural timber core" as equivalent to someone who, although having all freedoms in massive construction, loves one material and rejects all others. And I see it in that sense.
Wall construction? Probably nobody cares.
Exactly the opposite: in the sense of my attitude ("also a building contractor, just with a different category of building material than the brick colleagues") the wall construction (or even more: the quality and findability of the information about it) is simply an essential part of the service description.
By the way, the wall construction was a driving topic in the trend towards individual planning in prefab construction: in the course of Passive / Energy Saving Ordinance / KFW, prefab builders would have had to revise all their house types, as today there is no prize to be won for once being ahead of solid construction in the 90s regarding the ratio of thermal insulation to wall thickness. That is when the slogan "fire free for individual planning" was issued.
KfW standard maybe again, so you can get an allegedly cheaper loan, but how it is implemented? I think almost nobody cares.
I fully agree with you here (unfortunately).
I believe that the meaningless catalogs you criticized are exactly what most builders who don't go to an architect anyway are looking for.
I did not at all make a general criticism of catalogs lacking content—because that would not apply to the majority of the field. Initial information may also omit details, and most providers manage quite well to mention everything essential even in a twenty-page brochure—I don't expect light switch and handle manufacturers to be listed there yet. What I found embarrassing was that the one provider who takes the longest to be useful tells absolutely nothing besides blabla in an unwieldy book that weighs as much as all competitors' info combined.
I criticized some solid builders for lack of content, but only on a taste level: assembling copied designs—leaving aside licensing issues—while one could present a broader range of building proposals from concrete self-built examples, I find unnecessarily pathetic. But statements about what the houses are actually made of were included.
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Before this thread gets off track into the sub-discussion "architect-designed house or prefab house," I want to remind you of my original question. I am interested in:
- did the providers whose information material you received rather print pure appetisers, or were the information suitable to prepare "head decisions" from?
- regardless of what you individually weigh as your top ten facts: were they clearly extractable from the info material or hidden like Easter eggs?
- did you rather get the impression that you could compare houses like, for example, cars (or more like loans or insurances), or did the brochures just say "we are proud of our photographer—but never ask what's in our sausage dough"?
The information I received was otherwise mostly of satisfactory quality. At least everyone except this provider with the particularly thick book (the one from the large doctors' villa confectioner doesn't even weigh half as much) concerned themselves with houses of today for people of today with plots of today, instead of serving me an unusable replacement with some socio-philosophical brochure on urban development of tomorrow, which only a housing association could handle on the plot alone. That disappointed my expectations for an information package for a single-family house builder 2017/2018 with drums and trumpets (and that of Jericho).