Why You Should Never Google: Prefabricated Wooden House

Nowadays, our first reaction to anything we don’t know is to search on Google, and information about house construction is no exception.

When someone considers building a house, they usually go to Google and search for a specific term, which typically varies between ‘build a house’ and all its variants. In this case, those of us who are up-to-date and run a blog know that the quintessential term is ‘Build a prefabricated wooden house’.

Of course, this term responds to very specific needs: the indispensable requirement of any client to know the price and construction time of their future home. However, this search often leads us to an endless number of promotional pages for very low-quality prefabricated modules offered by technically unreliable builders.

For a purchase as significant as a home, it is essential to be well-informed. Today, we have reached a point where 90% of people search for their home online. Whether it’s finding land to build on, a small apartment, or a luxury property, we all gather information and search online.

Thus begins a fierce battle among builders, real estate agencies, architects, and all types of prefabricated house module companies, all striving for visibility in Google’s top positions.

We ourselves are architects of ecological homes and are very aware of what our competitors are doing; clients search and compare online and want to have all the information about a home before scheduling a first meeting.

FIGHTING ON GOOGLE FOR PREFABRICATED WOODEN HOUSE

Although we are not proponents of the fierce battle on Google to rank for a single keyword, and prefer to present our work and projects clearly and directly, this week, while visiting some competitor pages, we realized that they are all vying for the same term, which is:

“Prefabricated wooden house”

Within this term, we find an incredible number of options and varieties, and especially many house builders who promise extremely low prices for supposedly ecological homes that can be built in just a few months.

However, one must be cautious with builders offering homes at excessively low prices, as these homes often come with hidden catches. Naturally, these are prefabricated homes where not only can no modifications be made, but their low price reflects that the total cost only includes the housing module.

The price typically does not include earthworks, foundations, or usually any type of finishes such as kitchens, bathrooms, and other installations.

Depending on the type of land we have, the hardness of the subsoil, and the slope, earthworks and foundations can represent a significant additional cost to the home. In fact, this is one of the topics we frequently emphasize when a client comes to our studio who has not yet purchased land.

On the other hand, building an ecological house is much more complex than simply installing a prefabricated wooden house model, no matter how much it is marketed as ecological. Bioclimatic design, which utilizes natural resources such as sun or natural ventilation to regulate the temperature and interior environment of a home in a healthy way, are key factors of an ecological house and cannot in any way be based on prefabricated elements, as they must be designed according to the characteristics of the plot.

The use of a prefabricated construction system, which is what we do at Slow Studio, is very different. If, once we have the wooden house design, we send it to the builder’s workshop and they prepare the wall or roof modules in the workshop, we will save a lot of costs and, above all, construction time on site.

HOW MUCH DOES A PREFABRICATED WOODEN HOUSE COST?

While online we can find homes whose price is assured to be around 500 euros per square meter, it must be noted that these types of homes usually do not include the costs of foundations, finishes, and do not allow any modifications to the base design.

In our studio, we design custom homes with a prefabricated wooden construction system whose price can be adjusted up to 900 euros per square meter, considering that it is a home adapted to the terrain and climatic conditions of the location, making the most of natural resources such as sunlight and heat or ventilation.