The cheapest house? “Not long ago I would have said a Canadian, now it’s not so obvious”
According to data from the Extradom.pl website, the most popular among investors are relatively small house designs with an area of 80-100 m², covered with a gable roof, with a living room and two or three rooms. These are usually buildings without a garage. These are typical houses at the price of an apartment, which allow a couple or a family 2 + 1 to function comfortably, i.e. in the most common model in Poland.
– I decided to look at the costs of building a simple house with an area of 100 m², built using different technologies. Not long ago, I would have answered without hesitation that the cheapest to build would probably be a light wooden frame, the so-called Canadian one. However, changes in the technical conditions that new buildings must meet and a significant increase in the price of wood in recent years have made it no longer so obvious– says Wojciech Rynkowski from Extradom.pl.
Houses on a foundation slab
Let’s start with the most popular brick technology, because here the price range is the largest. A house on a foundation slab and finished to a developer’s standard costs from PLN 490,000 to PLN 600,000, depending on the selected materials, contractor and the method of finishing the building. On average, we can assume that it is PLN 550,000.
The same house made of prefabricated wooden elements, but in the so-called heavy German frame technology, with a very similar standard of finishing oscillates between PLN 500,000 and PLN 540,000. It is also worth mentioning a log house, which in the developer standard (but without taking into account the price of the foundation slab) will cost about PLN 450,000.
Prefabricated concrete buildings are becoming increasingly popular in Poland. In this case, the price of the discussed house with the foundation slab is PLN 570,000, but it also includes heat recovery. This is a valuable addition that will certainly bring tangible benefits during many years of use.
Perlite blocks, steel frame
The discussed building erected using expanded clay technology will cost around PLN 550,000. It is clear that the prices of the individual technologies are very similar. A house built of perlite blocks will be slightly more expensive – its price is around PLN 600,000.
At the end of the list I have the steel frame technology, which is not very popular in our country and is only just gaining investors’ recognition. In this version, together with the foundation slab in the developer’s condition, an example house will cost about PLN 500,000.
The entry into force of the WT 2021 technical conditions in 2021 had a significant impact on the equalization of construction costs. They impose very rigorous energy efficiency standards, which mean that the house structure must have very good thermal insulation properties. It is necessary to use suitably thick insulation layers or technologically advanced materials, and this translates directly into construction costs.
Wojciech Rynkowski sums up that it is difficult to indicate one, cheapest technology for building a house. It turns out that more important than the technology used for construction is whether:
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the house we choose will have a simple, easy-to-build and therefore cheap structure
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how much construction work will we be willing to do ourselves
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and – perhaps most importantly – what installations we want to equip it with, because it is worth thinking about installing, for example, underfloor heating or heat recovery already at the stage of choosing the project and designing the body of the house.
– It is also easy to notice certain analogies with the automotive market. Car prices in individual segments are similar and subsequent models differ mainly in equipment, materials used and standard of workmanship. These are the elements that make some more expensive and others much cheaper – sums up Rynkowski from Extradom.pl.