Which prefabricated house company should it be?

Hello everyone, I am looking for meaningful information. We have looked at and partly consulted the following companies:

Schwabenhaus
Bien und Zenker
Scanhaus Marlow
Schwörer
Weberhaus

So far, we have not been able to create a reasonable comparison, let alone find anything as comparison points on the internet. What immediately caught our attention is that the salespeople are interested in a quick signature.

Is there anyone here who has already built with one of these companies and possibly also compared with other companies listed here?

You can compare 3 things, the first one involves work, the other two not at first:

- Construction performance description using an Excel spreadsheet including a column with your priority for individual items. Features that you want for yourselves but that are not included in the construction performance description should also be entered in the spreadsheet.
- Gut feeling and impression in the show house
- Price (comes at the very end)

You can find many experiences online (of course overall more bad than good), but these impressions are very personal and usually not objective. Additionally, most of the mentioned companies work with many subcontractors, so the house construction might have been great for some people but things go wrong for you (or vice versa, of course).

I can only recommend what Domski says. Make yourself an Excel table and compare the construction and service descriptions. That gives you a good picture of the included services. Also look at the sample contracts and assess whether you are satisfied with them. Then 1-2 companies should possibly already be eliminated.

Our approach was:

- Visit many many companies first (e.g. model home park)
- Sort out based on gut feeling and first reviews
- Have more serious talks with 4-5 companies, request construction and service descriptions and sample contracts
- Eliminate companies that did not provide construction and service descriptions/sample contracts or simply appeared unfriendly/impersonal
- Evaluate the last 3 companies in detail in an Excel list
- Now we are down to 2 companies and would build with both in good conscience (Hanse and Haas)

In the end, in my opinion, at least 2 companies should remain so that you have a good negotiating position on the price.

Additionally valuable: preliminary sampling and a visit to the factory. Not everyone does this, but the more concrete you are, the more likely it will be offered.

Without that, we would not want to sign a contract.

Where does the fixation on a "prefabricated house company" come from - are you perhaps victims of the fast-build myth or the fixed-price myth?

By the way, the providers as house builders are not as bad as the quality of their pushy sales teams.

On the other hand, where you more often find both (i.e. business practices and construction performance) more consistently at a high level are the regional construction companies. So rather away from the nationally known names.

So I built with one of these companies and compared them all. My approach was to request approximately the same offer from all in terms of size, equipment, and scope, as similar as possible, and to make it clear that I have a plot of land and money and will build, so I want to know prices and services. Then I made an Excel table with the points that seemed important to me at the time, e.g., wall structure and what is included, and compared it. In the end, my wife decided which company she liked better from the first impression.

For the mentioned companies (because they are not necessarily cheap companies), I would definitely include a heavy construction general contractor for price comparison. For us, it took almost exactly 8 weeks between the first groundbreaking and the topping-out ceremony this week. Classic brick-by-brick and no truss roof. Brick-by-brick is not as slow as some think.