Holy crap! The price of this thing (not including the land) is like $400K
"Monthly payment assumes line of credit of $389,000 equal to base cost of Dwell House with fixed 4.5% interest rate, a 30-year repayment term, and a 20% down payment."
Yeah, looks like the intended market is explicitly people who are already homeowners, in CA or WA, and have space for an ADU in the backyard, which they could use as supplemental income for renting. This is probably also why they point out the mortgage cost should be lower than rental costs in CA and WA (so you can attract renters). Although I assume 4.5% is actually more generous than you can get now.
(Side note, does anyone know if installing an ADU, where you live, qualifies for a primary residence mortgage or not? You won't live in the ADU, but you live on the same land as it.)
Otherwise, this is certainly too expensive, so the average person is not the market for this product. If an average person bought this, they're a bit foolish, probably better off buying existing property or trying to DIY a container home somewhere it's legal. Of course, the unit here itself looks quite nice, and I'd love to see them figure out how to lower prices and expand their market to customers who are aspiring homeowners, not people who already own and want some rental income.
... the intended market is explicitly people who are already homeowners, in CA or WA, and have space for an ADU in the backyard, which they could use as supplemental income for renting.
Are there really many people with the finances to buy a $400k ADU for their backyard who want to rent it? That seems unlikely. More likely these are targeted for home studios/gyms or in-law (or adult child) suites.
I have nothing against ADUs, and wish more areas allowed them, but $400k is an absurd price.
Just realized, what if the market is illegal ADUs - you can quietly build a foundation perhaps, and then get this dropped in in a day and that's much less likely to be noticed by nosy passers-by and city officials than a whole construction site for months on end.
It does seem to be a mostly turnkey price, including a (I'm guessing) slab foundation and running sewer, water, and electrical, and placing the structure, so that price is a lot less crazy.
The other thing they have working against them is cost per sq ft goes up with smaller builds since you still need expensive spaces kitchen and bathroom and they can only shrink so far.
In most high cost of living places where building ADUs makes the most financial sense I'd be surprised if you could do something like this start to finish for much less than 400k between permits, variances, drawings, groundwork, utilities, construction and finishes. The foundation and utils alone could be 100k+.
This price seems out of whack unless they're abusing some loophole (technically it's a trailer so it's DMV) but most of those are pretty tightly closed.
I’ve always found this whole line of thought strange, from both sides.
I’m a capitalist to the core, but I have no problem with the ideas of renting things that are cheaper to rent than to buy, or with “eating bugs”. Alternative protein sources are pretty interesting to me, actually. Every dollar I can cut from my cost of living is a dollar I can use to buy assets - and to me, an “asset” is something that either produces income or appreciates at a rate above the cost of maintenance.
If I were a collectivist, what’s the advantage of trying to force either of those things on people - or even to incentivize it? Why would I care how people feel about their food and property? I’d want to change the structure of society itself to provide more obvious value in public services than the free market provides privately. Angering people by imposing things on them - especially if that imposition is easily assigned to the things I’d want to grow, like the government - would be extremely counter-productive.
>change the structure of society itself to provide more obvious value in public services than the free market provides privately
Actual free markets that exist are "free" in the way that a wheel turns freely if it has good bearings with little friction. They're not free of human oversight or in competition with the people who maintain them.
Is this a joke? Are these people really so out of touch with reality, or have they really just decided to go all-in on the top 2-3% of the market?
$400k for a prefab 1 bedroom house - with the caveat that costs can go up if you don't have the perfect specifications they require. If you were to actually buy the land to fit this tiny home, you'll likely end up with a bill north of $700k-1M+ depending on your location.
Either I've become poorer or the world has become far richer to afford $400k sheds.
This kinda thing is pretty common in the "tiny house" online community, to the point that it's a ubiquitous joke among commenters. "Oh wow, it only cost you $80,000 after your dad's construction company donated most of the labor and materials and your fiance's family let you park it on their New Zealand ancestral estate."
> or have they really just decided to go all-in on the top 2-3% of the market?
I would say they are targeting the top of the market. Looking at their marketing it looks like they aren't even pitching this as an alternative to a home, rather a n alternative to a backyard "shed". They aren't going after people looking for an affordable prefab home. They look like they are targeting the folks that have a huge backyard and an itch for a designer "shed".
Even if the housing market nosedives I think they would still be in business, because they are providing a simple financial and practical equation to consumers where none exists. If you have a home on a big enough plot worth $1mm or more, you could look at how much you would increase your home value with this product and say yes/no. The permits are handled, the construction is handled, the end-product’s aesthetics are almost guaranteed. All this is essential for a full-time employed home owner who doesnt have time for a major home renovation project.
> they are providing a simple financial and practical equation to consumers where none exists.
This is just the current process with better marketing. You can get the same result from finding and buying an ADU plan and submitting it to a few contractors for quotes.
I’m sure there are places where adding this would increase the value of the property for more than the cost - but going this route would be leaving ~$200k on the table, at least. The market segment that prefers to forego $200k of potential profit in favor of convenience cannot possibly be that large.
A custom built ADU by a small contractor is just not comparable, there is so much uncertainty down that route, and already we are talking about a much more involved process of acquiring and vetting bids. I imagine that the market would be expanded with this more certain and lower touch product.
This is priced around what it would cost to build something similar from scratch in the back yard of an existing house in an area like Seattle. The caveats make sense, you can easily spend $100k in permitting, site prep, and foundation if your site is not flat (common in this area).
> If you were to actually buy the land to fit this tiny home, you'll likely end up with a bill north of $700k-1M+ depending on your location.
The house is ridiculously priced, but you're way off about land.
Let's be honest, this doesn't need much land. But you can still easily buy land for $2,000/acre and less. I paid 60k for 40 acres, and that's if I value the EIGHT buildings at $0 (about 6 years ago).
Interestingly, some locals have sold property recently at exorbitant rates by marketing in NYC and similar markets. I think people in the city just have no idea.
I find the phrase "bulk purchase land" to be vaguely amusing for some reason.
My neighbor's 11,000 sq-ft house sits on two 15 acre lots. You buy the land in places where a 40-acre lot isn't considered unusual. IOW, pretty much anywhere that's not a city or a suburb of a major city.
As for the "how," you contact a realtor who specializes in rural properties and tell them what you're looking for.
Rural property is usually listed as a lot. 40 acres is the most common size in my area--most of the original 40 acre plots have stayed intact and not been broken up.
You know this doesn't add up right? Who exactly is paying $2000/acre and then sticking a 540 sq ft house down? You build these tiny houses because you're paying a premium for the space. You don't build extraordinarily expensive tiny houses in areas where land value is cheap.
Maybe not this prefabricated house, but in general it makes more sense to plop a trailer or something on your (large, inexpensive) property if it's way out and isolated, because it's harder to get materials and contractors to build a conventional house. Or you can build your house yourself; I know people who did that.
>Land is absolutely cheap in some places in the world, but any place you'd actually want to live in this house is going to have expensive land
You are probably correct if you restrict to exactly $2K.
However, right now on Zillow there is an 18+ acre lot advertised at $65K, which is 17 miles or about 25 minutes drive from the capitol of the fourth largest state in the US.
That's about $3.5K per acre.
My first thought is it's not buildable, but it says there's electricity and a well. Suggests it would be good for a hunter, but I don't know what a hunter would consider adequate.
There is nothing here about the foundation (usually the most costly part of a tiny house). I guess that means it is only designed to be used in temperate climates that never experience freezing temperatures and frost heave.
You can get a scratch-built home to passive house standards at this price point. Aren't small prefab houses supposed to be cheaper than custom site-built houses?
Manta's pricing doesn't include the costs of the foundation, electrical, and plumbing. I don't know exactly what that would run you in the HCOL areas they are targeting but I'm sure it's shockingly expensive.
Most homes will cost $150 per square foot to build, give or take $50 either way.
This costs over $700 per square foot, and even if you have the land for it, that cost doesn't include the infrastructure to pull electricity and plumbing to the site. Or a foundation.
The benefits of prefab housing - cost savings/modularity/flexibility - never seem to materialize and benefit the end consumer in this space. And I've been a prefab following junkie for at least 15 years now.
Any cost savings is eaten up by greedy companies through marketing to the affluent and any flexibility and modularity is eaten up by your local bureaucracy, NIMBYs and absolutely draconian building codes.
Until the latter points change, I'm afraid prefab benefits will never see the light of day and we'll stick to traditional housing that costs, you know, under $500/sqft (lol)
Wow! 389k for a very small trailer/prefab!? The CA housing market must have truly detached from all reality. It really looks like it’s something you would set on a cinder block foundation.
Start from searching "manufactured homes" and pay attention to the companies that "deliver" them without axles. Double-wides will be better looking in general.
Once you find one, you can use that company to find if they're part of a "factory build housing alliance" or similar (eg https://www.factorybuiltwisconsin.com/about-us/ ) and spread out from there.
The official terms at play here are "modular" and "mobile" home. These are the terms that define the kind of house you're thinking of. "Mobile" homes are constructed to a separate set of parameters, and are not "permanently" mounted on the property. (Regardless of how "permanent" you make the attachment for a "mobile" home, it is still titled separately from the land.)
Modular is the term of art for a factory-built home that is installed on the land and becomes titled as "real property" with the land its self, search for "modular home builders." Nearly every modular builder also builds mobile homes, so when you go to their site, look for "available as modular" or "modular" as a category or search term.
FWIW, "modular" and "mobile" are actually built to two different manufacturing requirements and specification, and why "mobile" homes are often disallowed in towns and cities, amongst other reasons, is that HUD controls the specs for "mobile" while "modular" must meet local building codes.
I don't think I'll ever understand upmarket stuff.
A quick search yields mobile homes range from 784 to 1440 square feet, with an average retail price of $76,400 [1]. This is 540 square feet for $400k. For those unaware, mobile homes are not just the tin can on wheels stereotype. Some look no less gorgeous than this does. Except they're 2-3 times as large, and go for a fraction of the cost.
It's not about value for money, it's a Veblen good for signaling to other wealthy people. Same thing with most audiophile stuff; beautiful design and luxury materials are part of the equation, but it's more about the aesthetics of expense. Nobody needs (or really, even believes) in $1000 oxygen-free copper cables to carry audio signals from record player to amplifier to speakers, but if you've put down $25k on fancy hi-fi components, connecting them up with $50 cables feels poor.
You can get A-frame assembly materials for much, much less. Not exactly sure who this is marketed to, unless they are going for people looking to Airbnb these things out for absurd amounts.
Wow, this is just out of this world. $300K plus for a prefab house and only 540 sq/ft? I was expecting, $50k possibly up to $99k, but this is just wow. Not a customer, most definitely.
As someone who recently went through the pre-fab house market for a weekend/cabin build for a property we own, this product suffers from the same problem nearly every other pre-fab "designer" product we saw out there: the cost is substantially more than custom-built and the time to deliver is as long, or longer.
I mention "designer" since there is a pre-fab market for non-designer homes, which do come pretty close to the mission of being a better value without being a "mobile home" - think Pratt, etc.
Ultimately, we went stick-built on-site and paid roughly 35-50% per sq ft of what a comparable pre-fab designer home would have cost, while allowing us to focus costs on the aspects of the house that mattered most to us, while going budget where it didn't matter as much, and still having full control over the process. FWIW, for less than the price of this unit alone, we had a full custom 1,200 sqft house 3BR/2Bth, metal garage, 800' driveway, well, septic, and 1-acre pond built.
I can see if you're willing to pay the premium on the design aesthetics, but designer modular houses have a long way to go to being a more affordable option for most buyers.
I’m a bit mystified at the reaction to this comment.
Describe what you want to a drafts person, get the regulatory stuff done (via the draft person or architect), hit the Google machine and talk to contractors. It’s painful when you have no idea what you are doing, which is why the all inclusive price is attractive (and high).
You need to work with a builder, since we were working in a somewhat "rural" area, we couldn't work with any of our local builders (in the city where we live), without going way out of budget due to travel expenses, etc.
As to how we found the builder? Google was of little help, and nearly everyone with a website was saying things like "we start at $250/ft for a barndo" -- basically, insane pricing.
What we ultimately did: I went to local stores, talked to neighbors, and started asking them for references for different parts of the process - e.g.: well building, dirt work, etc. I aligned on the most common people they referred, then asked each of them the same two questions: who do you like working with as a GC, and who built your house? Everyone aligned on a single person, so I called him and the rest is history.
When I was looking at modulars 5 or so years ago, the costs were pretty much the same.
But I generally agree - $390k base price for a 5XXsqft house is ridiculous. But it seems this is marketed towards CA residents (who might be used to much higher costs).
Edit: whoops, I see your's was targeted at "designer" prefab.
If I wanted a 550 sq ft prefab house, I'd be looking at whatever was the higher-end/better quality market segment of the "singlewide" manufactured home industry, which are built in a factory and come all in one piece and are delivered on their own wheels by semi truck.
But then of course you have the problem that many cities ban manufactured houses and they are only considered socially acceptable in lower income rural areas.
If you look at the floor plans of some modern "singlewide" manufactured homes they are totally a fine amount of floor space for one or two people to live, though obviously constrained by the maximum legal road lane width allowable and their long/linear design.
Yeah, it seems this house is similar dimensions to a single wide trailer. Just different construction and fancier interior.
It seems like most urban/suburban CA zoning would prohibit either model - a trailer, or placing this in a backyard. It seems trailers are common in rural areas and small towns because the zoning allows for that option.
My 2nd thought would be something like a Tumbleweed if I wanted an extra room for the back yard with some mobility (have an office that you can take on vacation).
That 14' wide 644 SQ ft unit looks pretty good as a floor plan, it's about the same size as a small 1bd apartment in any major city. I do think they're counting the porch in the square footage however. It does appear that the 14 ft width is the practical maximum for transportation by road as a "wide load" without a lot of special planning and permits in advance.
If you look at the floor plans you can see where they're modular.
https://youtu.be/a984YzmJB4M has a video of them setting up the home and 1:41 in, you can see the two sides - one being put on the foundation, one awaiting the crane. At 4:00, you can see one with a very high peak with the roof being propped up while being assembled (I assume that it was shipped in a folded position).
When you've got that degree of modularity, then two, three or even four modules becomes feasible. The key is that the modules are assembled ahead of time.
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As to the 644 sqft - 46 x 14 = 644. The porch doesn't appear to be part of that and would add another 84 square feet if it was.
Yes, I'm just saying the wording and such in their site alludes to CA as their target market. There's also no way this would sell in most of the country, where you can buy a normal house with land for less.
At the price they are charging, anyone for whom $398k isn't a lot of money compared to the hassle of a custom high-end build is their target market.
Yes, there are some Californians who fit that profile, just as there are some people in Texas for whom that is also chump change, but they are a tiny fraction in either place. This is targeted at very few people - probably the top 0.5% of the wealth or income distribution.
Except you can get modulars this size or larger from other places for cheaper, with more design options. So if they're targeting the top .5% and they have a lot of competition, then it seems they have a poor business model.
> Except you can get modulars this size or larger from other places for cheaper, with more design options.
They are selling premium design, status, and convenience, not "cheaper, with more design options". There are lots of products sold that way, most famously Gucci bags, which I've heard are a very profitable business for that company.
If the price seems high to you (as it does to me), then you, like me, are not part of the target market.
I've been looking at the HUD-1 "kit" homes from Home Depot. One example is $33k for an unfinished 450 sq ft multi-room home, but you can put it together yourself in 2-3 weekends. Would have to compare to that a "custom" home from a contractor. Did you consider these type options when you were looking?
Often the most expensive part of the house building is the labor, and if you can do some of that yourself or work with a builder who can tell you how to save labor costs you can do quite well.
For example, a simple "shed roof" without any gables or whatever those little decorative accents you see at the corners can be much cheaper (each accent could cost $500-2000 in labor alone). If you have a builder and architect who work together, you can really reduce the cost without making the house look like a garage with windows.
AFAICT, these range from $84-$170/sq ft for exterior materials only, no labor, no insulation, no foundation. If you're looking to DIY something and want an easy start, these and many other options may be a good choice for you, but this is very expensive for some markets, given you just have materials for the shell.
Generally speaking, it's best to think in "heated + cooled sq feet" for comparison, and also consider the foundation type. These are post-frame, so in the market where I had built, $120/sqft for post-frame is "cheap/budget", and $300/sqft is "high-end". We paid $180/sq ft, and that included electrical work, plumbing, appliances, A/C, full custom cabinets, custom windows, etc. As you can see, these aren't a great deal in that regard, but your local market conditions may vary.
Writing as somebody who grew up around architects and engineers this thing is not worth more than 80k. The price at 400k is an insult to peoples' intelligence.
Stick building a 550 sq ft rectangular shaped boxy house with a very boring and standard roof truss design on concrete sonotube piles, screw pilings, footings or a traditional concrete slab foundation is not rocket science.
Your various other costs in rural areas will come in with things like code compliant underground electrical trenching to extend service to its breaker panel, septic tank/connection, water lines, etc.
the boxabl is not that much different from some of the Turkish built container based housing that's been developed for use at US military bases in the middle east and central asia. And used for things like "man camp" mining and oil/gas camps in northern canada.
If you were to go to the US base in Qatar you'd see housing not radically different from it. Designed to ship by standard 20/40 ft ocean cargo container.
I am skeptical that it costs 50k however, the thing as shown in the front page website promo that occupies an approximate 20'x20 area surely costs more than that.
The thing is that the military housing is designed to be moved multiple times, for a house there's really no need to make it fancy and expandable like that; if you can save some money by shipping it in a box that needs some basic assembly you should probably go that way, even though it looks cool to watch it build itself.
Incorrect. The Boxabl uses all new building materials and manufacturing methods that allow for rapid production of housing. Think 1 house per minute. The new building materials also result in superior energy ratings, fire, structural and more. The shippability of the unit also makes it superior to a cramped shipping container house. The room can ship at the lowest cost without compromising on room dimensions. Also, the price is the price, they have SEC reporting that shows the price is correct.
Even those skip a lot of the expensive parts of "building a house" which are the permits and fees and utilities.
What would be exciting about these companies (any of these companies!) is getting a state like CA to pre-exempt local permitting so that if you meet certain requirements you have a shall-issue one-stop permit to install.
Just spitballing but saying something like "any property that is over 1/4 acre and currently has less than 2000 sq ft of dwelling space may add one of these subject to a utility inspection only" or something like that.
Then suddenly the modularity is really useful; skip all the permitting/inspections that are for stickbuilt and use these.
This is a great business idea. Is anyone doing it?
A lot of smaller municipalities would probably jump at that. It would be a smaller market segment to start a company, but you wouldn’t even have to be building anything; you could probably rebrand existing designs made by other companies and get the certification on your rebranded version.
If you could get to the point where you could offer a very easy approval process with a major city and could guarantee that the structure be in place and usable in a given time frame or a full refund, I strongly suspect you’d have more business than you could easily handle.
389k is kind of insane for something this small. My plan is to build something myself but I’m always eager to see what is being put out there by bigger players. This just doesn’t make a lot of financial sense to me.
One way to look at that price is that a skilled craftsman may make $150k a year say (ok let's give him $200k) and that still leaves $189k and a whole damn year to build something that size.
I can buy a nice flip house in Kansas City for under $80K, and it's already connected to electrical and city utilities. No site prep. I can go even cheaper if I could live in 650 square feet, but I guess that's addressed by tiny houses. Wait a second ...
Any site that wants your email address to find out what price it is is a data harvesting op. I should have guessed from the Dwell name that it would be overpriced aspiration porn for lifestyle tourists.
The average price of a brand new double-wide mobile home, at its most expensive, was $170K in December 2021 (they usually run about $110K). Throw a bougie wrap around it, gut the interior, and fill it with expensive crap, and you're still at half the price of this small single-wide.
Would this be classified as a "tiny home" by most jurisdictions? Not at this price-point, but we've been looking for prefab housing related to a transitional housing grant, where many cities in Florida do not allow tiny homes.
Depends on jurisdiction. Some places explicitly allow ADUs, but I don't know what building specs they require.
Many pre-fab tiny-homes are just mobile homes with trendy marketing material. This is where a lot of the issues come from with tiny homes - mobile homes are frequently banned in nicer suburban/urban areas. They're built to different codes than build-in-place homes as well (not a bad thing, necessarily, just different code written by a different organization).
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 197 ms ] thread"Monthly payment assumes line of credit of $389,000 equal to base cost of Dwell House with fixed 4.5% interest rate, a 30-year repayment term, and a 20% down payment."
(Side note, does anyone know if installing an ADU, where you live, qualifies for a primary residence mortgage or not? You won't live in the ADU, but you live on the same land as it.)
Otherwise, this is certainly too expensive, so the average person is not the market for this product. If an average person bought this, they're a bit foolish, probably better off buying existing property or trying to DIY a container home somewhere it's legal. Of course, the unit here itself looks quite nice, and I'd love to see them figure out how to lower prices and expand their market to customers who are aspiring homeowners, not people who already own and want some rental income.
I don't believe the ADU qualifies for primary residence mortgage unless you have a HELOC.
But, yes, you shouldn't have problems taking out a construction loan to buy the ADU, and then after completion, refinancing as an investment property.
Are there really many people with the finances to buy a $400k ADU for their backyard who want to rent it? That seems unlikely. More likely these are targeted for home studios/gyms or in-law (or adult child) suites.
I have nothing against ADUs, and wish more areas allowed them, but $400k is an absurd price.
The other thing they have working against them is cost per sq ft goes up with smaller builds since you still need expensive spaces kitchen and bathroom and they can only shrink so far.
In most high cost of living places where building ADUs makes the most financial sense I'd be surprised if you could do something like this start to finish for much less than 400k between permits, variances, drawings, groundwork, utilities, construction and finishes. The foundation and utils alone could be 100k+.
This price seems out of whack unless they're abusing some loophole (technically it's a trailer so it's DMV) but most of those are pretty tightly closed.
I’m a capitalist to the core, but I have no problem with the ideas of renting things that are cheaper to rent than to buy, or with “eating bugs”. Alternative protein sources are pretty interesting to me, actually. Every dollar I can cut from my cost of living is a dollar I can use to buy assets - and to me, an “asset” is something that either produces income or appreciates at a rate above the cost of maintenance.
If I were a collectivist, what’s the advantage of trying to force either of those things on people - or even to incentivize it? Why would I care how people feel about their food and property? I’d want to change the structure of society itself to provide more obvious value in public services than the free market provides privately. Angering people by imposing things on them - especially if that imposition is easily assigned to the things I’d want to grow, like the government - would be extremely counter-productive.
Actual free markets that exist are "free" in the way that a wheel turns freely if it has good bearings with little friction. They're not free of human oversight or in competition with the people who maintain them.
$400k for a prefab 1 bedroom house - with the caveat that costs can go up if you don't have the perfect specifications they require. If you were to actually buy the land to fit this tiny home, you'll likely end up with a bill north of $700k-1M+ depending on your location.
Either I've become poorer or the world has become far richer to afford $400k sheds.
"Engineered oak floors" is an example - and while more expensive than vinyl I'm not sure it's really "top of the line".
Even some of the really fancy custom builders would be able to build a 600 sq ft house for less than $400k.
Probably get more of what you want and better deal by using some local contractor.
I would say they are targeting the top of the market. Looking at their marketing it looks like they aren't even pitching this as an alternative to a home, rather a n alternative to a backyard "shed". They aren't going after people looking for an affordable prefab home. They look like they are targeting the folks that have a huge backyard and an itch for a designer "shed".
This is just the current process with better marketing. You can get the same result from finding and buying an ADU plan and submitting it to a few contractors for quotes.
I’m sure there are places where adding this would increase the value of the property for more than the cost - but going this route would be leaving ~$200k on the table, at least. The market segment that prefers to forego $200k of potential profit in favor of convenience cannot possibly be that large.
The house is ridiculously priced, but you're way off about land.
Let's be honest, this doesn't need much land. But you can still easily buy land for $2,000/acre and less. I paid 60k for 40 acres, and that's if I value the EIGHT buildings at $0 (about 6 years ago).
Interestingly, some locals have sold property recently at exorbitant rates by marketing in NYC and similar markets. I think people in the city just have no idea.
There's a whole country out here.
My neighbor's 11,000 sq-ft house sits on two 15 acre lots. You buy the land in places where a 40-acre lot isn't considered unusual. IOW, pretty much anywhere that's not a city or a suburb of a major city.
As for the "how," you contact a realtor who specializes in rural properties and tell them what you're looking for.
Rural property is usually listed as a lot. 40 acres is the most common size in my area--most of the original 40 acre plots have stayed intact and not been broken up.
I bought it in a pretty traditional manner.
Here's a site selling acreage in southern Missouri starting at under 2k/acre: https://www.landwatch.com/missouri-land-for-sale/southwest-r...
Land is absolutely cheap in some places in the world, but any place you'd actually want to live in this house is going to have expensive land.
If you're living in a place with $2k/acre land, you'll likely want to build a proper house anyway.
You are probably correct if you restrict to exactly $2K.
However, right now on Zillow there is an 18+ acre lot advertised at $65K, which is 17 miles or about 25 minutes drive from the capitol of the fourth largest state in the US.
That's about $3.5K per acre.
My first thought is it's not buildable, but it says there's electricity and a well. Suggests it would be good for a hunter, but I don't know what a hunter would consider adequate.
There are way better priced similar options already. There are similarly sized mobile trailers that are just a bit less fancy around 120k.
This costs over $700 per square foot, and even if you have the land for it, that cost doesn't include the infrastructure to pull electricity and plumbing to the site. Or a foundation.
There's a lot of variability in how to build.
No idea how this is built; just noting.
Any cost savings is eaten up by greedy companies through marketing to the affluent and any flexibility and modularity is eaten up by your local bureaucracy, NIMBYs and absolutely draconian building codes.
Until the latter points change, I'm afraid prefab benefits will never see the light of day and we'll stick to traditional housing that costs, you know, under $500/sqft (lol)
A trailer about this size would go for maybe 75k.
https://www.thehomesdirect.com/homes/palm-harbor-homes/casa-...
Once you find one, you can use that company to find if they're part of a "factory build housing alliance" or similar (eg https://www.factorybuiltwisconsin.com/about-us/ ) and spread out from there.
Modular is the term of art for a factory-built home that is installed on the land and becomes titled as "real property" with the land its self, search for "modular home builders." Nearly every modular builder also builds mobile homes, so when you go to their site, look for "available as modular" or "modular" as a category or search term.
FWIW, "modular" and "mobile" are actually built to two different manufacturing requirements and specification, and why "mobile" homes are often disallowed in towns and cities, amongst other reasons, is that HUD controls the specs for "mobile" while "modular" must meet local building codes.
A quick search yields mobile homes range from 784 to 1440 square feet, with an average retail price of $76,400 [1]. This is 540 square feet for $400k. For those unaware, mobile homes are not just the tin can on wheels stereotype. Some look no less gorgeous than this does. Except they're 2-3 times as large, and go for a fraction of the cost.
[1] - https://realestate.usnews.com/real-estate/articles/how-much-...
No clear price, just the monthly payment, how much one (supposedly) can rent it for, and the expected profit.
I find this a turn-off and a clear sign of the company's practices.
Unfortunately I am the minority, I know.
It's there, just not at the top. Does that count?
I mention "designer" since there is a pre-fab market for non-designer homes, which do come pretty close to the mission of being a better value without being a "mobile home" - think Pratt, etc.
Ultimately, we went stick-built on-site and paid roughly 35-50% per sq ft of what a comparable pre-fab designer home would have cost, while allowing us to focus costs on the aspects of the house that mattered most to us, while going budget where it didn't matter as much, and still having full control over the process. FWIW, for less than the price of this unit alone, we had a full custom 1,200 sqft house 3BR/2Bth, metal garage, 800' driveway, well, septic, and 1-acre pond built.
I can see if you're willing to pay the premium on the design aesthetics, but designer modular houses have a long way to go to being a more affordable option for most buyers.
Describe what you want to a drafts person, get the regulatory stuff done (via the draft person or architect), hit the Google machine and talk to contractors. It’s painful when you have no idea what you are doing, which is why the all inclusive price is attractive (and high).
As to how we found the builder? Google was of little help, and nearly everyone with a website was saying things like "we start at $250/ft for a barndo" -- basically, insane pricing.
What we ultimately did: I went to local stores, talked to neighbors, and started asking them for references for different parts of the process - e.g.: well building, dirt work, etc. I aligned on the most common people they referred, then asked each of them the same two questions: who do you like working with as a GC, and who built your house? Everyone aligned on a single person, so I called him and the rest is history.
But I generally agree - $390k base price for a 5XXsqft house is ridiculous. But it seems this is marketed towards CA residents (who might be used to much higher costs).
Edit: whoops, I see your's was targeted at "designer" prefab.
But then of course you have the problem that many cities ban manufactured houses and they are only considered socially acceptable in lower income rural areas.
If you look at the floor plans of some modern "singlewide" manufactured homes they are totally a fine amount of floor space for one or two people to live, though obviously constrained by the maximum legal road lane width allowable and their long/linear design.
It seems like most urban/suburban CA zoning would prohibit either model - a trailer, or placing this in a backyard. It seems trailers are common in rural areas and small towns because the zoning allows for that option.
A shorter double wide might be an option. Triple wides are a thing also.
My 2nd thought would be something like a Tumbleweed if I wanted an extra room for the back yard with some mobility (have an office that you can take on vacation).
And my 3rd thought would be go even smaller than 550 sqft if I just wanted an office and https://www.autonomous.ai/adus/studio-pod or https://www.autonomous.ai/adus/autonomous-work-pod - though those aren't things for living in, they're interesting for creating a separation between the house and the office in the WFH environment.
https://youtu.be/a984YzmJB4M has a video of them setting up the home and 1:41 in, you can see the two sides - one being put on the foundation, one awaiting the crane. At 4:00, you can see one with a very high peak with the roof being propped up while being assembled (I assume that it was shipped in a folded position).
When you've got that degree of modularity, then two, three or even four modules becomes feasible. The key is that the modules are assembled ahead of time.
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As to the 644 sqft - 46 x 14 = 644. The porch doesn't appear to be part of that and would add another 84 square feet if it was.
See my sibling comment for specifics, but this price/sqft is higher than construction costs in even the priciest CA construction markets.
Yes, there are some Californians who fit that profile, just as there are some people in Texas for whom that is also chump change, but they are a tiny fraction in either place. This is targeted at very few people - probably the top 0.5% of the wealth or income distribution.
They are selling premium design, status, and convenience, not "cheaper, with more design options". There are lots of products sold that way, most famously Gucci bags, which I've heard are a very profitable business for that company.
If the price seems high to you (as it does to me), then you, like me, are not part of the target market.
They are 22 years old, enough to have been referred to in mainstream popular culture like the Office, the Simpsons, and famous punk rocker memoirs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwell_(magazine)#In_popular_cu...
Often the most expensive part of the house building is the labor, and if you can do some of that yourself or work with a builder who can tell you how to save labor costs you can do quite well.
For example, a simple "shed roof" without any gables or whatever those little decorative accents you see at the corners can be much cheaper (each accent could cost $500-2000 in labor alone). If you have a builder and architect who work together, you can really reduce the cost without making the house look like a garage with windows.
Generally speaking, it's best to think in "heated + cooled sq feet" for comparison, and also consider the foundation type. These are post-frame, so in the market where I had built, $120/sqft for post-frame is "cheap/budget", and $300/sqft is "high-end". We paid $180/sq ft, and that included electrical work, plumbing, appliances, A/C, full custom cabinets, custom windows, etc. As you can see, these aren't a great deal in that regard, but your local market conditions may vary.
Stick building a 550 sq ft rectangular shaped boxy house with a very boring and standard roof truss design on concrete sonotube piles, screw pilings, footings or a traditional concrete slab foundation is not rocket science.
Your various other costs in rural areas will come in with things like code compliant underground electrical trenching to extend service to its breaker panel, septic tank/connection, water lines, etc.
If you were to go to the US base in Qatar you'd see housing not radically different from it. Designed to ship by standard 20/40 ft ocean cargo container.
https://www.boxabl.com/
I am skeptical that it costs 50k however, the thing as shown in the front page website promo that occupies an approximate 20'x20 area surely costs more than that.
What would be exciting about these companies (any of these companies!) is getting a state like CA to pre-exempt local permitting so that if you meet certain requirements you have a shall-issue one-stop permit to install.
Just spitballing but saying something like "any property that is over 1/4 acre and currently has less than 2000 sq ft of dwelling space may add one of these subject to a utility inspection only" or something like that.
Then suddenly the modularity is really useful; skip all the permitting/inspections that are for stickbuilt and use these.
A lot of smaller municipalities would probably jump at that. It would be a smaller market segment to start a company, but you wouldn’t even have to be building anything; you could probably rebrand existing designs made by other companies and get the certification on your rebranded version.
If you could get to the point where you could offer a very easy approval process with a major city and could guarantee that the structure be in place and usable in a given time frame or a full refund, I strongly suspect you’d have more business than you could easily handle.
Now some of that stuff listed can be quite pricy, septic systems can run upwards of $50k but this thing is designed to be stuck in a backyard.
Happy to see someone shares my back-of-the-envelope calculation.
Here's a very interesting read on how things were almost a century ago. Surely we can do better than $300K prefab nowadays.. https://thecraftsmanblog.com/the-history-of-sears-kit-homes/
I love ideas like this, but this one isn’t in the same universe as something I would consider for practical purposes.
Get outta here with 400k.
this is not a tiny home it's in the market for "ADU".
Many pre-fab tiny-homes are just mobile homes with trendy marketing material. This is where a lot of the issues come from with tiny homes - mobile homes are frequently banned in nicer suburban/urban areas. They're built to different codes than build-in-place homes as well (not a bad thing, necessarily, just different code written by a different organization).