‘It was a spooky day’: Modular country home buyers list pros and cons

Few people manage to quickly buy a comfortable homestead at an adequate price, and not everyone agrees to build their dream home for years. This is where the modular home comes into play. Many newly-minted summer residents are captivated by the promise of manufacturers of prefabricated houses to build in a day, at most in 5-7 days, a turnkey house with all communications already installed and even with furniture to boot.

In three years, the number of such manufacturing firms has grown tenfold. And the cost of a standard module is three times. And yet it does not deter buyers.

Marketers explain such an explosion of interest and demand by the fact that their products have many undeniable advantages. There is a deal of truth in it. Although there are also enough minuses, only about them, as a rule, manufacturers are silent.

But there is another factor that gave rise to this phenomenon – the psychology of our people. Many of those who buy prefabricated houses are adherents of the European way of life. They position themselves as successful, active, environmentally enlightened, and this paradigm fits perfectly into the module-house, in which panoramic glazing occupies a large area, and natural wood and metal are used from finishing materials, it turns out stylish, expensive, and environmentally friendly. Everything as you like.

Modular houses are bought by both pensioners and families with children, but still most often young, active people, those who are referred to as the Millennium generation. Moreover, the Internet allows many of them to work remotely.

“There are many well-known bloggers among our clients,” manufacturers of modular houses admit. “They like to brag to their followers on social media about how cool they live and post photos of our houses. They have hundreds of thousands of followers who want to emulate them. It turns out that we don’t even need to advertise our products, they advertise themselves.”

“They can’t do without jambs”

Lera and Oleg have been living in a modular house for two years. I came to them through a chat, where they exchange impressions and useful information, just like them, victims of advertising.

According to Lera, the idea to move to live outside the city was born to them in the midst of a pandemic. They then rented an apartment on the outskirts of Moscow. When the regime of strict self-isolation was announced in the city and it was forbidden to leave the house, Lera began to have health problems.

“I was suffocating at home, the walls were literally crushing me, my friend saved me, who invited me to live in her country house. At that moment, I realized that I no longer want to return to a city apartment,” the woman recalls.

Everything was fine with the finances of the young couple, but they were still not ready to buy a house for 20 million, and it is impossible to find anything cheaper in the near Moscow region.

“One of our friends advised us to buy an empty piece of land and put a modular house there. They were then much cheaper than they are now, and we immediately became interested in this idea, ”says Lera.

She literally fell in love with her future home; she and her husband saw its analogue at the demonstration site. It only remained to find a suitable site, but there were no problems with this – there was plenty to choose from. The problems began much later, when the couple had already invested all the money in the cost of the land and paid a deposit for the future house.

“When we signed a contract with a company producing such houses, we were promised that it would be ready in six months,” says Lera. – But a couple of months later they called and warned that the deadlines could be shifted.

We were then in such euphoria that we were not particularly upset, just think an extra month of waiting. But the wait was much longer. Lead time was 9 months. During this time it was possible to give birth to a child!

I freaked out terribly because of this, because we also paid for renting an apartment, and interest on a loan. But my husband only answered all my lamentations: “What did you want, baby, this is our homeland, they can’t do without jambs here.”

“Squirrels look in windows”

Unfortunately, the firms messed up not only with the timing of the delivery of the house: by the time it was delivered, the adjacent company that was installing the modules did not have a single free team. And the clients were faced with a difficult choice: either they would have to pay again for the assembly of the house to another team, or the house would be unloaded, and then they would have to wait no one knows how long until the already paid workers were released. Moreover, such unloading-overloading can affect the quality of the house itself.

“It was the scariest day of our lives. They called us at 7 in the morning and said that the machines with the modules left the factory, but now they don’t have free equipment and workers for installation. Like, look for yourself. Although we paid a round sum for delivery and assembly.

Then some man called my husband and offered his help with the installation, but for a fee. He assured us that we would be able to get back the money paid to the company for the installation. Apparently everyone does it. And it was necessary to agree immediately. The cars are on their way. In general, we agreed, but the money was returned to us after a few months and with great difficulty, ”complains Lera.

But, despite all these misadventures at the stage of waiting and building a house, the young couple is absolutely satisfied with it. According to Lera, it was only after the move that she realized how oppressive the walls of her city apartment were. She sorely lacked daylight, almost always the light was on in their apartment, but now even on the most cloudy day it is light in the house, because the glazing occupies an entire wall.

“When we decided on panoramic glazing, we were most afraid of huge electricity bills, but despite the fact that even in the most severe frosts the temperature in our house does not drop below 22 degrees, we pay about 10-12 thousand rubles for electricity in winter. In my opinion, this is quite a bit for a house of 77 sq.m.,” says Lera.

Many acquaintances of Lera and Oleg are interested in whether they are afraid to live in a glass house, especially since they have not acquired curtains or blinds on the windows. It turns out that this is the strongest and most pleasant impression from the house: squirrels and birds often look into their windows, and people also feel part of nature.

“The temperature inside was plus fifty degrees”

Prefabricated houses in the last two or three years have firmly occupied their niche in the Russian suburban real estate market. But they still failed to break into the lead.

First, as soon as demand began to grow, so did prices. For example, for a house like that of Lera and Oleg, which they bought for 3 million rubles, they are now asking for almost 8 million. And this is not affordable for everyone.

Secondly, the construction of frame houses is now successfully developing – this is the main competitor of modular houses, which many people bought because the parts of the house made in production are ideally suited to each other during assembly. Thanks to this, it is always warm in such a house, there are no drafts, and it is assembled easily and quickly.

The classic module-house already has all the engineering, plumbing, built-in furniture. And if the client wishes, they can even deliver it with furniture and interior items. In the literal sense of the word: after it is brought and collected, you can go in and live.

It is very difficult to repeat such quality and speed in the construction of a frame house, but this market segment also does not stand still. In three years, professionals and masters of their craft have appeared among the “frame builders”, now there are also quite a lot of such firms that can build a house from scratch on a turnkey basis in one or two months. But with the production of modular houses, the opposite story turned out. Firms have appeared on the market that copy original products, but their quality is much lower. Customers complain that it is cold to live in such houses, after assembly there are many imperfections that then have to be eliminated at their own expense.

“I had to deal with prefabricated houses. Several of my clients, whom I helped to buy plots of land for construction, commissioned such projects. By the way, there are different technologies for their manufacture and assembly, it is wrong to reduce everything only to modules. Technologies differ in the size of prefabricated parts and installation methods.

But the principle is the same everywhere: the parts are made in production with maximum precision, they are attached to each other like puzzles, and in the manufacture of wooden parts, a special regime of temperature and humidity must be observed. The slightest mistake in technology, and the ideal house will turn into a stylish barn, from every corner of which it will blow. It will be cold in winter and hot in summer.

Excessive glazing can also cause many problems. If the house leads, the panoramic windows will crack. To replace such glass costs up to 100 thousand rubles. In addition, in the summer, a closed house gets very hot through the glass; without a climate control system, it turns into an oven. Some of my clients said that when they arrived in the evening after work, the temperature inside the house was about 50 degrees.

In general, my opinion is this: modular homes can really look very stylish. But if you want your house to be in reality, as in the brochure, you need to order from reputable companies, and it will be very expensive. And I would not trust firms that tempt customers with low prices. Otherwise, you will lose both money and time, and most importantly nerves,” commented realtor Nikita Ozerovsky.