Southern Gentleman Tiny House

• Marsha Cowan
  June 29, 2018, 9:25 am

  The price is way to high for a tiny house that seems to be built of mostly stock items. The average national cost of a new home is $125 per square foot including contractor’ fee. That would make this tiny house cost about $26,250. Add the price of a special made trailer with tandem axles with weight of 7500lbs (average cost-$3200), and the house now costs around $29,250, and the contractor still gets about a 50% profit. So why does this house cost twice as much? It only has one floor, one bath, one kitchen, and appears to use stock materials.

  When are we going to get tiny houses back into a reasonable selling range? I can totally understand about a 50% profit for building one. That is the going contractor price, and it is harder to build a tiny house than a regular house because of all the tight and intricate spaces, and people should be well paid for their good work, but this house can cost half as much and someone still be paid well for their work. My tiny house cost me roughly $4800 to build, and I have it listed at $7500 on Craigslist. That is about 36% profit, and I think that is reasonable for my tiny house, so 50% profit would be reasonable for a house with a real bath and a kitchen. The house above can stand to come down in price.

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  • James D.
    June 29, 2018, 8:49 pm

    Hey Marsha Cowan, I don’t disagree that this could be lower in price but there are some that should be understood about commercial built tiny houses and what is actually being paid for…

    First, lets clarify that cost per sq ft is just a vague measurement that can only be used for comparison between equivalent structures… It doesn’t account for any details like how the house performs, how healthy it is to live in, what materials were used, etc.

    There’s many things in a big house that bring down the cost per sq ft because they add to the total sq ft but don’t all add as much to the cost…

    Things like hallways, corridors, interior walls and rooms with no exterior walls or utilities running through them all cost far less than kitchens, bathrooms, etc.

    But a tiny house typically consists only of the high cost parts of the house, and thus will seem to have a much higher cost per sq ft even when it’s lower in actual cost.

    So the cost per sq ft for a big house and a tiny house would never be equivalent because they will never be accounting for all the same things…

    Second, that said there are things that do cost more… Like the trailer is not $3200… If you look at the Trailer Made website, their starting price for a 12,000 GVWR (6000 lbs tandem axle) is $3995.00… So a 7500 lbs tandem axle would actually be closer to $5K.

    This is because a regular trailer is not designed for building a house on…

    Sure, you can improvise like you did with yours but that’s risky and won’t last well long term, especially when you go bigger and heavier and it limits your design option if the trailer doesn’t allow for the design you want to make.

    Many builders get their trailers custom made to order for specific houses they are building to fit the layout and features they will be building into it… This is how they can get the maximum space and still keep it road legal, as well as manage so many different designs and layouts… as well as allowing some to opt to use materials like drywalls or tiles because they can ensure a much more rigid trailer chassis that won’t flex as much as a standard trailer would… among other differences…

    So the prices of just the trailer typically runs ~$4K to over $8K… It would cost even more if you tried to customize a trailer yourself, which is why you don’t see people just making their own trailers…

    Another reason for costs is many having tiny houses made for them are having them made custom and custom will always cost more than using mass produced products…

    It’s more labor, there’s no cost cutting on material costs as you can’t buy in bulk or offset costs over multiple builds as every build will be different, and the whole process often involves other things like design, architecture, engineering and other types of work done for it because everything in a tiny house has to be functional and serve a purpose.

    Big houses built that way cost hundreds of thousands on up into the millions if you want an apples to apples comparison…

    But custom also means costs depends on what the client wants to end up with… Not everyone needs custom made cabinetry, or stone counter tops, or solar power systems, etc. or even the same size tiny house… The less labor involved then the lower the cost will be…

    It also depends on how the builder’s business is set up… A builder who works on a single house at a time and only does a few per year or even just one will have higher costs per house than a builder who can do dozens or more houses a year…

    Companies like Incredible Tiny Homes have one of the lowest prices in the market for a commercial builder who does everything custom but they manage it by spreading their costs and profit margins over a lot of builds… In the little over 2 years they’ve been in business, they’ve built over 130 homes but the average tiny house builder is building only a few houses a year.

    So they’re not all going to be able to compete with companies like Incredible Tiny Homes on pricing…

    Instead, they offer things that you may not get with ITH like high end finishes… Builders like Abel Zyl of Zyl Vardos can produced houses that are priced over $100K but they’re basically works of art that no other builder can match, for example…

    Costs also vary depending where the builder operates as rules and regulations for businesses that determine the cost of running a business vary across the country and material costs also varies across the country… along with new vs reclaimed material costs.

    So there’s always going to be a range of prices and the reasons for them will vary both from the builder and from the people who commission them…

    But there are always options and difference ways to do it… Andrew Bennett of Trekker Trailers, for example, introduced a more mass produce-able tiny house he’s calling Core Housing… Essentially a 24′ SIP constructed THOW that’s only $28K…

    It’s not custom, structurally very plain, but it has a bedroom with closet, kitchen, bathroom, and a usable living space for a single person or couple can consider move in ready and being constructed of SIPs means it’s still a very strong structure that’s well insulated and energy efficient…

    If a big company were to actually mass produce a given tiny house design then the costs could be even lower…

    While the aforementioned Incredible Tiny House can do a custom 20′ THOW for a base price of $32,500 and they offer things like workshop deals to be able to get that even lower to get an idea where the budget range actually is…

    And there are other options as well like how you did it with a DIY, among other examples… The trick is understanding the context and making apples to apples comparisons to really know what you’re getting and why without confusing it with apples to oranges comparisons… Like the old saying, the devil is in the details…

    People can do it for less but there are valid reasons why some do it for more…

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