Prefabricated house or solid house?

Hi,
as always, at least two opinions will form here.
Some swear by solidly built houses, others by prefabricated houses. . .

Okay, I belong to the first group. :cool:
In my opinion, solid houses are not more expensive overall than prefabricated houses.
The latter can be easier to customize individually, whereas prefabricated houses often incur additional costs.
Fire protection has already been mentioned, is probably overrated, personally I feel more comfortable in a stone house.
KFW standards can certainly be achieved with both variants, but whether this is absolutely necessary I dare to doubt, everyone should decide for themselves.
Probably the value retention / resale value is also better with the solid house.
And what happens with possibly later necessary changes or repairs?
I also do not believe that prefabricated houses are built so much faster.
The preparations (earthworks, foundation/slab or basement, building application etc.) are the same for both.
The actual house is then certainly erected faster, but the final finishing work also requires a lot of time here.
Additional costs for crane and delivery also apply.
Whether the time savings are really relevant in practice should also not be overestimated.

As I said, all my personal opinion.
About 20 years ago I built a solid terraced house and had no problems.
Now I will again build solidly with a local general contractor.

Collect the tips and experiences of the other participants and then make yourself an overview with pros and cons, what is important for you personally.
Regards Olli

Forget about the topic of time savings. With the bigger manufacturers, you easily have half a year until the house is erected, sometimes significantly longer. That the production for your house only started a week before doesn’t help you, unfortunately ;)
The interior finishing is relatively similar. Sure, with a prefab house you can pre-install some of the wiring, but overall that doesn’t make much of a difference. On the other hand, long points like screed drying simply have their waiting time with both. In short: the solid builder takes a little longer and usually starts earlier, the prefab builder waits a long time at first and then puts up the house in 3 days.

At first, we were also quite focused on prefab houses; it kind of suggests quickness, affordability, cost security, and little own work. In reality, quality and equipment always cost something, cheap are only the promotional houses with air heating. If you don’t want that, the price rises quickly. Changes to the floor plan -> expensive. And the suggested “all-around carefree” from the “prefab” house dissolves into thin air once you see that the manufacturer doesn’t want anything to do with the specific plot: no earthworks, no building permit, construction power at the builder’s expense, etc. First, after signing the contract, you have to go to the architect and leave plenty of money there again.
We are now leaning towards a local solid builder who actually offers the package as we originally hoped for from the prefab house. He takes care of earthworks, construction power, building permit, etc., so we should have significantly higher cost certainty than with the big prefab manufacturers.

I only know Hoffmann like Allkauf Haus and Massa Haus from some low offer prices on Immoscout. I don’t know about Hoffmann, but with Allkauf Haus the corresponding plot of land never actually existed. Currently Hoffmann also has several offers on Immoscout, do you mean one of those?

We had offers from “good” prefabricated house companies and would have ended up nearly the same pricewise. Only the KfW subsidy would have brought more, because the solid builders mostly excluded KfW40 as well.

For the price difference with you, we probably would have built a prefabricated house, but for a difference of just a four-figure amount it was the solid house. But ultimately that is really just a gut feeling and the fear of the new. We especially had fears regarding soundproofing.

I now know many who definitely wanted a wooden house, so who knows how the resale value will look in 30 years.

So the individual planning of a house in timber frame construction (prefabricated house) being more expensive than in solid construction is not generally correct. It all very much depends on the provider. Some only build their standard houses and you can at most move interior walls, sometimes cost-neutral, sometimes with a substantial surcharge. That applies both to solid houses and timber frame houses. There are providers who also allow completely individual planning, both in solid construction and timber frame construction. Standard/catalog houses are cheaper because, for example, the structural engineering is calculated once and not newly for each house built. With individual planning, it must be created anew each time and of course that costs. Again, this applies to both solid construction and timber frame construction. The decisive factor is indeed the choice of the general contractor; if they only build catalog houses, that’s how it is. When we were at Viebrockhaus, we were told not to request too many changes; everyone should be able to recognize that it’s a Viebrockhaus... In the end, we took an architect and had a timber frame house built by a general contractor who does not offer catalog houses; such providers also exist. Price drivers are individuality and quality, both in the solid construction sector and in timber frame construction. In both construction methods, compromises can be made in both points to save money. I don’t think there are major differences between timber frame and solid construction in this regard. But here can surely say more. Aside from that: you write that the planning for the house is set. Is there a construction commitment? Back then, we had a broker who kept offering us plots. Each time with a finished plan for an urban villa, “individually and specially adapted to the plot” planned with always the same general contractor. Strangely, always exactly the same urban villa on differently oriented plots. The broker’s fee was somewhat below average, but there would have been a not insignificant commission for the broker’s “individual” planning service. We live in crazy times...

I know many people now who absolutely wanted a wooden house, so who knows how the resale value will be in 30 years.

That certainly also depends a lot on the region and the development of land prices. With us, a 30-year-old house only determines the purchase price to a small extent. The reason is that land is so expensive and scarce that the existing house hardly determines the value once it reaches a certain age. How it will be in 30 years? No idea! But we also built for our family now and not for a resale in 30 years...

So the individual planning of a house in timber frame construction (prefabricated house) being more expensive than in solid construction is not generally correct. It all depends a lot on the provider.

But it's not that much wood ... more drywall and insulation. Although with solid construction, the question is also what solid means. Aerated concrete is not really a stone but a building material. I think prefabricated houses are less stressful because much is fixed at the beginning. I currently have to shovel snow and water out of the shell every day... You then look a bit enviously at the prefabricated houses. However, we did not want that (even now).