How much savings through building materials to quasi-wholesale equity?

In principle, you can do the following.

You get 4 Croatian construction specialists. There are enough of them there. You bring them to Germany and organize an apartment or a room. Then you register a secondary business and hire the Croatians here. They then build your house officially. Or they have a Croatian company. Then they work here normally. Good specialists who can mostly do everything. You have to make sure that one of them speaks German. In winter, they also have time because many want to be at home in summer and work in tourism. But in winter, they often look for work.

Then you buy your material and get the machines, you can rent everything etc.

This way, you could certainly build very cheaply and also with high quality. I estimate a proper house can definitely be built for 200,000 euros.

An electrician drives a taxi in summer and rents out holiday apartments downstairs. In winter, he takes 50 euros per day as wages for his work. In Croatia as a self-employed master electrician. I know some construction companies that work here with Croats, Bosnians, or Albanians.

Sure, that is not a solution for everyone but it can be done.

And to come back to the question. Material surcharges of 100 percent are not uncommon. Often even more. Much more. A normal calculation is very rare. That’s why everything is so expensive.

A few years ago, a normal electrical distribution cost about 10,000 euros. Today the electrical designer (planner) already gets 20,000 euros before any work is done. The nonsense is getting bigger and bigger. The energy consultant still gets 10,000 and the architect also holds out his hand strongly.

But all that money is not invested in the house. In the end, the cheapest material is installed and paid for expensively. That is the reality.

In my opinion, you tend to exaggerate quite a bit here, but I can now confirm from experience that something like this can work. I have now found a few Albanians for tiling and painting preparation. They are nice, do a decent job (not perfect, but so far no German craftsman has been perfect at my place either) and very cheap. But yes, you either have to know someone who can more or less coordinate the people a bit in their native language and also understands a bit about construction. And of course, you don't have any warranty in this case either. That has to be considered.

Why is there no warranty? You do it on invoice, right?

If you hire them, you have no warranty. If it is a company from Croatia or Albania, you might have a legal warranty, but you cannot enforce it. My men will probably also make repairs if something comes up, but strictly speaking, I don't know if they will still be reachable in 6 months.

If you hire them, you have no warranty. If it is a company from Croatia or Albania, you might have legal warranty, but you cannot enforce it.
My men will certainly do repairs if something comes up, but strictly speaking, I don’t know if they will still be reachable in 6 months.

I do have a warranty, but based on what I have experienced so far, I sincerely hope that this situation does not occur.

I’m not exaggerating. All my reports are based on relevant experience. No one is born a builder. Nowadays, even skilled workers do not necessarily have profound expert knowledge. You can also have a house built where, in the end, only an Albanian construction crew shows up from the expensive general contractor.

In that case, I might as well get them myself.

I had to cover very large roof surfaces with beaver tail tiles. The roof frame was finished and it was raining a bit inside the house. Money was tight as always. So what to do. There was an ad on eBay classifieds, roofers from Poland looking for work. I then called a Hamburg number. Sent pictures. Then they gave me a price. Only labor, I already had most of the material. The matter was urgent, it was early November.

So on Sunday evening, the two roofers from Poland arrived. A hundred kilos of potatoes, a few jars of bigos, and some tools in the car. They slept in the house. They were there for three weeks. Everything was done perfectly. In the end, the local roofers were amazed at how finely they had done it. The valleys and such. Beer and cigarettes were free, the price was top.

It was quite risky since there were neither experience nor references. Certain things were also unknown to them, like how to counter-flash the chimneys with slate. But we managed to do it as I had imagined.

Today, with a German company, I would have had to pay ten times as much. I have now done a total of 500 square meters of roofs, all with beaver tail tiles. That’s enough.

Apart from that, when you drive through the Polish provinces like that, you really feel like a poor bastard. The houses standing there are madness. So the Poles are good builders too, just like the Croats. In tunnel and bridge construction, almost only Croats are employed. What they have built in Croatia itself you have to have seen. You can drive 400 km on the highway in 3 hours without a construction site, without a bump or a pothole. Compared to that, we are a developing country.

And how many people are involved in legal disputes regarding warranty here with local companies? Rarely does the contractor show up two days later to settle or willingly admit to shoddy work. The chance that the Albanian works properly is still considerably higher.