Tips for house construction companies in South Baden-Württemberg

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I am beginning to understand that you probably understood even less than you yourself realize. So, let's start completely at Abraham: Under the term "prefabricated house" you apparently gather all providers of a "finished house" in the sense of "turnkey construction" and basically see two ways, namely this one and in contrast or alternatively the composition of individual trades. There is also a concept of "prefabricated house" in common language, where it designates a prefabricated house. That means a house is not completely manufactured on site, but in two phases; namely the shell construction wall panel by wall panel in a production hall and then transported by low-loader truck to the building site, where it is then assembled and the interior finishing is done. The majority of manufacturers of such houses use this method with wood frame panels (incorrectly, but commonly called "timber studs"). Due to weight, harder to transport and therefore made by far fewer manufacturers, this can also be done with porous bricks, expanded clay or other "stone materials". Medium weight and the youngest on the market, there are also "solid wood" wall panels of various construction variants. The "prefabricated" house manufacturers are all general contractors ("GC") or, as far as they offer "shell houses," shell construction GCs, but do not call themselves that. The term GC is often only used for those GCs who build classic on-site built houses ("stone on stone"), i.e. "masonry." A general contractor means, from a commercial point of view, to act as the sole contractual counterpart of the client, i.e. as a construction contractor to offer all trades of house construction - at least the shell construction - and to employ the craftsmen of the finishing trades as their employees or subcontractors. For the client this means: one signature and one package price. General contractors offer their services both in tenders by architects and also directly to clients. Many clients naively consider architects to be floor plan drawers, which is why they find their fees unnecessarily high, and would like this service to be "cheaper under the table." Many GCs have realized this, have contracted architects themselves, and now offer house construction including planning services. Especially overly clever clients want to save even more and consider awarding the trades individually as the smartest way, as they dream of summing the cheapest individual contracts. At this point their stinginess would bite its own tail, since then they would also lack the "free extra cost" architect of the GC. So some GCs act as shell construction GCs including approval planning and let the clients continue dreaming in peace of their cleverness. There are several perspectives here. The one that I consider the smartest is to plan your house with an architect - and not only up to approval, but turnkey in the literal sense. That means the architect not only "draws" the house, but also issues the contract award (here again I consider it wise to let the architect also bid as GC on the contracts) and also has the site management. And to make the barrel of learned terms overflow, there are also property developers. These are GCs who buy plots and resell them as a package with the houses built on them. For liquidity reasons, they increasingly do not do this as was once common with already built houses, but with contracts to start building the houses only after signature. The buyer can still have significant influence on the planning, thereby feels like the client (which he legally is not here) and thus unlearns the difference between GC and property developer (PD). As a result, house-building interested parties generally talk about "property developers" after contacts with PDs, even if they mean GCs.

Look here in the category "Experiences with house building companies" combined with the names of the nearest district towns around your building site (and/or with names of regional construction contractors you already know) - there you will encounter reviews of such companies and their competitors. If all else fails ;-) you are welcome to add gmx (de) after my member name, as long as you are not yet part of the round table of forum intramail PN authorized users here. But first sit down safely, take a deep breath, as said chew well before swallowing, and if necessary order a Doornkaat from Günni - you know, best regards, cheers :)

Very helpful information; thank you very much for that!

General contractors (including prefabricated house providers and developers) add a flat surcharge for themselves (and not a small one), but usually offer a fixed price.

With individual awarding, the architect gets paid for the tenders and coordination, but usually does not take on the cost risk.

Accordingly, it is important to work with an architect who works with proper estimates from the start. There are plenty of stories in this forum about architects whose 20% cost overruns are normal.

With individual awarding, you can certainly save a few euros, but you bear the cost risk.

We do not have a plot yet and [...] are imagining a multigenerational house with a finished basement, so that we can basically rent out 2 apartments.

So, if I understood correctly, the plot search service is rather discouraged here?

The basis for the offers were simply project houses, which we then set up quasi in theory without a plot.

Since the plot and the built house are quite strongly dependent on each other, is it really sensible to first only look for plots?

Since the plot of land and the built house are quite dependent on each other, is it really sensible to only search for plots initially?