When it comes to buying a kitset home, understanding what you are getting for your investment is not always that easy. Although we show the prices for all our kitset homes on our website, you really need to check the specifications list as well when you are comparing kitset homes.
What is a Kitset Home?
A kitset home is a flatpack delivery of the materials needed to build the home with the help of your Licensed Building Practitioner. There are no specific rules as to what is included in a kitset home, and not all kitsets are created equal.
What Makes a Kitset Home so Affordable?
The biggest advantage when buying a kitset home is the fact that all the building materials you need are supplied and most are also pre-cut to the size or shape required plus some are even partly assembled.
If you were to try and source these materials for yourself as an independent customer, there is no way you could purchase the items at the same discounted rate we can as a large customer and manufacturer. Due to our size and buying volume, we can access much better prices and also, often, higher quality materials too. For our Ubuilt kitset homes there are also a number of our proprietary materials included which aren’t available to other kitset home manufacturers such as the ZOG® steel frames and the ZX Panel® cladding.
External vs Internal Budgeting
It is easier to compare kitset home prices by breaking this into external vs internal stages as we do with our kitset homes. We deliver these in two stages so that you don’t have internal materials sitting around onsite unnecessarily. The external stage is delivered first to allow you and your LBP to build your home to lockable stage before the internals are delivered.
The second delivery is the internal stage which is where most kitset homes vary quite considerably.
Internal Specifications & Pricing
We believe that many of our home owners prefer to spend a little more (or less) on their kitchen or laundry, or exterior accessories such as a garage or decking. For this reason, we don’t include any of these in our kitset homes which gives you a lot more room to move in terms of how much budget you want to invest in these finishing touches.
The internal materials included in our kitset homes are interior doors, Gib®, insulation, complete bathroom, laundry tub and a Rheem 180L hot water cylinder.
It is at this stage when you will need to enlist the services of a registered plumber and electrician to undertake this work per New Zealand building code legislation. However, other sub-trades services such as soft furnishing suppliers, kitchen installer, flooring supplier, etc, are really up to you in terms of your time, budget and skills as to how much you do yourself.
See our entire list of specifications here.
Crunch Your Numbers
Ask us for a copy of our complete construction costs guideline which gives a rough breakdown of all the items and trades you need to include to complete your home to move in stage. Using this guide you can then source your own cost estimates or see where you can save costs by doing some things yourself, using recycled products or leaving some things out to a later date.
