Semi-detached house: one with a basement and one without?

Hello everyone,

In our new development area, semi-detached houses including the plots are being offered. We have purchased a plot and now want to make the house contract for a semi-detached house without a basement. All semi-detached houses were planned without basements by the same builder.

Now we have learned that the buyer of the neighboring plot with the other newly to be built semi-detached house actually wants to build with a basement. We are expected to start building at the same time. The big question now is who has to cover the additional costs? Whoever orders the basement basically has to pay, right?

In my assessment, the structural engineering would have to be recalculated and stepped foundations must be created under the semi-detached house without a basement, right?

Have you ever had such experiences?

I call over and already grab the popcorn.

If all this is carried out by a property developer, they have surely calculated it thoroughly. If the standard excludes a basement, the purchase price does not change due to things that are altered at the neighbor's.

I would also say, as long as it is implemented simultaneously by the same developer, you already have the best option.

I’m calling in @11ant and grabbing the popcorn already.

Hopefully you also have popcorn bag clips, because this fiasco will be over quickly.

All semi-detached houses were planned without basements by the same developer.
Now we have learned that the buyer of the neighboring plot with the other newly built semi-detached house actually wants to build with a basement.

Oh, so the neighbor wants that. I want a million, with cream. And that chickens can seriously fly.

Unfortunately, you did not name the project, so I cannot check it on a case-by-case basis. I am happy to learn, so please provide that. The non-existence of the Wolpertinger is strictly speaking an unproven assumption from a scientific point of view, and such a project would be "only" as rare as hitting a seven with an additional number. Therefore, I would really like to get to know it seriously if such a thing exists.

In my experience, I can exclude it with 99.75% certainty. At most – but even that would be an extreme rarity – exceptions might be made in the same project for variants "with and without basement" being offered, but then only entire semi-detached houses of the same kind. Regarding the basement, dizygotic twins are fundamentally possible and require hardly more effort than building the half with basement before the half without basement; and I personally would usually then lead the foundation of the half without basement stepped deeper than if both were built without basement. But that is only as an explanation for the readers who are interested in the fundamental answer. In a developer project, I exclude this rare building type very, very likely.

Possibly the developer offers the half-with-basement variant in a neighboring construction phase, and the neighbor misunderstood this. As a type, these models are all designed with basements in the drawer and are adapted each time to the situation of the building area. And this is typically the same for every "row," e.g., "without basement due to adjacent water protection area," "without basement because no large technical room required due to district heating," and only rarely "with basement due to hillside location." We are talking about a basement for a house that is unchanged in above-ground size, not a trivial extra cost like for a fifth gear or a second side mirror. But about an order of magnitude of about 25% surcharge, which significantly reshuffles the circle of interested parties. That means marketing has to address a completely different target group. But as I said, please tell me the specific project.

fünften Gang

Fünften Gang of course. I definitely went to school before Pisa, but the processing time of a maximum of four minutes is sometimes a bit tight at my age.