Build cost regional variations.

[Dee J]

Just hypothetical pondering. House retail prices vary according to region. Some of this variation is attributed to land costs. But does that account for all the variation? Ok, labour costs have some regional variance too.

I guess what I'm getting at is that in high house price areas, self build houses are more economically viable than in low house price areas. Discuss.

Our potential 120sq m project in Cornwall would probably have a ceiling retail value of £300k. Factor in a £90k  plot, £12k house rental meanwhile, and probably £15k in surface water management and foul drains leaves  £183k to build the house.... £1525 per square metre. Just doable I hope.

[Crofter]

It's not a given that a self build will be worth more than it cost.

Up here delivery can be a significant factor, and this may filter through to general costs. I noticed on another thread that I've been paying twice as much for battens as another poster. I sourced my roofing for two thirds of what I ended up paying, but couldn't actually realise the saving because the haulage wiped it out.

[Dee J]

Not looking to make a profit. Just can't afford to lose to much of a limited pot.

[ToughButterCup]

@Dee I use SPONS a good deal to  research prices... and as a reality check. It's also very illuminating on a whole host of other issues.

 

They use a price constant and calculate regional prices from that. I think I'm right in saying they use Outer London as the base measure  and apply various multipliers according to local ( whatever that means) variation.

Hence Lancaster is 0.92, Devon 0.95. There will be higher variations in your (or any other) locality. The local estate agent will be of more help

 

Outer London (Spon’s 2016)	1.00
Inner London	1.06
South East	1.04
South West	0.95
East of England	0.95
East Midlands	0.90
West Midlands	0.88
Northern	0.94
North West	0.92
Yorkshire and Humberside	0.91
Wales	0.95
Scotland

 

SPONS 2016. Building Costs Indices, Tender Price Indices and Location Factors. (p.39) licensed online access 02/11/2017

[dpmiller]

where's NI on the list?

[Ferdinand]

Of anybody wants a quick reference - these are government regions and I think the boundaries reflect National Trust regions quite closely - an NT Handbook may be the quickest reference.

 

EM is Notts, Derbys, Leics, Northants, Lincs and Rutland, I think.

 

NI must be somewhere where they do things differently .

F

 

[PeterW]

@Dee J -£1500 sqm is very doable if you look at the main costs carefully. Labour gets more expensive the more specialised or non mainstream that you go. Most good bricklayers can do brick and block in their sleep - go to ICf and although it’s just big blocks, ask @recoveringacademic how it can go awry ...

 

A good joiner can do lots of studwork, but ask them to do a Larsen truss frame from a pile of timber and you’ll probably regret it. 

 

What you can do though is work out where you can spend now and then in the future put in what you want. Bathrooms and kitchens can be changed - there can be a factor of 10 difference from low to high so buy wisely. 

 

A lot also depends on your skill -  if you can do things  like the plumbing then a pair of decent cutters and a box of fittings you can probably do the first fix in Hep2O. 

 

A lot about budget  is down to how much your labour is costed at - look at Grand Designs last night, what they built for £100k was amazing but it took 10 years ..... you could double your £180k budget based on what you can do, but that’s for you to decide ..!!!!

[ProDave]

There is a growing north south divide in the UK.  In London and parts of the SE house prices have risen much, in places doubled since 2007.  In the rest of the UK which is probably more than 50% of it, prices are at or below 2007 levels.

 

But building materials and labour costs have not gone down, certainly material costs have gone up.

 

I have mentioned my own example.  If I continue as I am doing all the labour I think we will get our new build 3 bedroom house done for about £210K in total.  It is only that low because I am doing so much of the work myself.  I reckon if I had paid tradesmen to do everything, that cost would have easily been £250K if not a bit more.

 

Now to put that figure into context.  We tried for 2 years to sell our old 5 bedroom house.  We only had one person who even came close to making an offer and he was mumbling about sub £250K for it which we would have rejected (it was valued at £300K and we would have accepted £280K)

 

The point being, there was a real possibility, if we were desperate, of selling the old 5 bedroom house for less than the cost of building the 3 bedroom replacement. A situation that would have been harder to avoid had I not done so much of the work to keep the costs down.

 

We still don't know what it will sell for. It's currently let to tenants who say they want to buy it in 2 years. I will believe that when / if it happens. If not it will go on the market again, but I see nothing to make me think the market will be any better in 2 years time than it is now, in fact plenty of things that make me think it will be worse. At least by that time I should know with more certainty what our final build cost is, and we will have had a couple of years rental income from the old house that may help to sweeten the bitter pill if it has to sell for less.

 

The plasterer that rendered my house and has just plastered the upstairs is just in the process of buying a plot.  I was talking to him about what he is building (I will be wiring it) and it turns out this is not his forever home, he hopes to build it and sell it at a profit.  I have warned him that may be hard to achieve. I think he's in for a disapointment.

 

I think mass builders can just about make a profit, because by building lots of small house on a densly packed estate they can build cheaper than a self builder can on an individual plot. Plus new house qualify for the help to buy scheme, something that massively skews the market in favour of new houses at the expense of limiting sales of used houses.

[ToughButterCup]

55 minutes ago, dpmiller said:

where's NI on the list?

 

SPONS does not refer to Norn Iron anywhere. Must be a policy issue,

[ToughButterCup]

22 minutes ago, PeterW said:

[...], but ask them to do a Larsen truss frame from a pile of timber and you’ll probably regret it. [...]

 

Oh God, how right you are.

Five 'chippies' talked to so far. Not one NOT ONE has ever done a birds mouth. They think a vaulted ceiling is a truss mounted on a wallplate. Never done a traditional ceiling.

 

There's a real skills shortage. And the more I network, the more I ask, the more I become convinced that self building is mainly about finding people with the right skills; or being prepared to make your own mistakes rather than pay others to make them for you.  (Thank @nod for that little phrase)

[ProDave]

4 minutes ago, recoveringacademic said:

 

SPONS does not refer to Norn Iron anywhere. Must be a policy issue,

And the figure for Scotland is in invisible ink.

[ProDave]

1 minute ago, recoveringacademic said:

 

Oh God, how right you are.

Five 'chippies' talked to so far. Not one NOT ONE has ever done a birds mouth.

 

Try calling it  Birds Beak. That's what I hear joiner refer to it as. They are probably too dim to realise you are talking about the same thing.

[MikeSharp01]

6 minutes ago, recoveringacademic said:

Five 'chippies' talked to so far. Not one NOT ONE has ever done a birds mouth.

Not sure you can be a chippy and not have done these, even I - an amateur, have done them!

 

Birds beak might work....as @ProDave says.

[Crofter]

That's probably another aspect of regional variation- different flavours of "always done it this way".

The few tradesmen I've dealt with have commented on how unusual my build is, and at times told me I was doing it wrong, because of features including: pier foundations; vapour barrier; airtightness requirement; windows fixed within, not on outside of, frame; MVHR; plaster finish; plasterboard finish; service void; engineered joists; full fill insulation; vaulted ceiling; 6" frame instead of 4"; use of tanking in shower; etc, etc.

[MikeSharp01]

17 minutes ago, ProDave said:

There is a growing north south divide in the UK.  In London and parts of the SE house prices have risen much, in places doubled since 2007.  In the rest of the UK which is probably more than 50% of it, prices are at or below 2007 levels.

You are right Dave - but at last things are turning down, house prices are down across London and SE this year. This is good because if the spread of the super rich continues London and the SE won't work because nobody, who the super rich need to service their life styles, will be able to live close enough to London to work there! People are already commuting routinely from Norwich  and beyond. Unfortunately our political class have no interest in really sorting things so the country(ies) can be a fairer, more balanced, place while the Westminster bubble is maintained by tax payers money! If, while we slowly rebuilt the houses of parliament,  we put the political classes - and parliament in a Portakabin city on the old Chemical plant sites in Middlesbrough they might get enough understanding of what it is really like to have the road to Damascus (not suggesting we send them there) conversion they need. (Rant over)

[Ferdinand]

ISTM that we should always be extraordinarily cynical about house price reports and surveys imo.

 

While I broadly agree with the comments about North-South divides etc, the report discussed on this thread about this BBC 'research' into how house prices had 'fallen since 2007 to 2017 in real terms for many people', which gave us to the chance to be outraged in salacious detail by going down to Ward boundaries, ignored at least one pink elephant in the room which was a huge variation. 

 

They used a 2007 starting point, which was pretty much at the absolute peak house price, and if they had used either 2005-6 or 2008-9 the price would have been 10-15% lower - entirely changing the narrative and conclusions. They were not even clear which ,month in 2007 they were using when there was a larger variation within the one year than many of the 10 year changes they were yelling about.

 

This graph is raw prices from here. Many more charts on the same page.

 

 

IMO that robustness test demonstrates their poor research quality.

 

Ferdinand

 

Edited November 2, 2017 by Ferdinand

[jack]

9 minutes ago, MikeSharp01 said:

 ...because nobody, who the super rich need to service their life styles, will be able to live close enough to London to work there! 

 

Exactly right, but then the cost of commuting can itself be eye-watering. Before I gave up working in London last year, my season ticket (just the train - no tube/bus) wasn't far off £4,000 a year for a trip of under an hour.

 

I reckon commuting cost me £10,000 a year in gross income when I added in things like lunches, the odd drinks after work, and buses when it was raining or I was in a hurry for the train.

[Ferdinand]

12 minutes ago, jack said:

 

Exactly right, but then the cost of commuting can itself be eye-watering. Before I gave up working in London last year, my season ticket (just the train - no tube/bus) wasn't far off £4,000 a year for a trip of under an hour.

 

I reckon commuting cost me £10,000 a year in gross income when I added in things like lunches, the odd drinks after work, and buses when it was raining or I was in a hurry for the train.

 

You needed to be working for TFL :-).

 

[jack]

I was about to say that the corresponding pay-cut would cancel out the reduced commuting costs, but then I recalled how much some train-drivers are on... 

[Ferdinand]

9 minutes ago, jack said:

I was about to say that the corresponding pay-cut would cancel out the reduced commuting costs, but then I recalled how much some train-drivers are on... 

 

I was thinking of PMs, and that TFL is in the sweet spot as a protected bureaucracy (=no competition) where the Govt cannot get at it due to reporting to the Mayor, and that the Mayor has not been able to crack down easily for political reasons for many years (though they are trying).They tend to get 2 free Go Anywhere in London season tickets.

 

Last year, 500 staff earning over 100k.

 

But I am OT.

 

Edited November 2, 2017 by Ferdinand

[Declan52]

1 hour ago, recoveringacademic said:

 

SPONS does not refer to Norn Iron anywhere. Must be a policy issue,

Due to the fact most of the materials used in the building trade are made here, sewer pipes, insulation,loads of concrete companies, how many irish timber frame CV companies are there, cheap and plentiful labour I would say the figure would be maybe 0.5-0.6. they don't include it so not to make all you guys from the mainland a bit jealous!!!

[PeterW]

2 hours ago, Ferdinand said:

 

I was thinking of PMs, and that TFL is in the sweet spot as a protected bureaucracy (=no competition) where the Govt cannot get at it due to reporting to the Mayor, and that the Mayor has not been able to crack down easily for political reasons for many years (though they are trying).They tend to get 2 free Go Anywhere in London season tickets.

 

Last year, 500 staff earning over 100k.

 

But I am OT.

 

 

Sadly not the case any more with TfL and then benefits are far less than they used to. From 2018 it will have significantly reduced support from central Gov so will have to find a lot of savings and the first to go are the freebies for staff. There is also a massive transformation programme underway across their entire business .... 

[Dee J]

Thanks all. Going to have a chat with an architect tomorrow. Exciting times.