These kinds of homes still exist [1]. How it would work (and still does) is you buy the materials and plans from them, they deliver it, and you have to build it yourself.
The prices are still comparable when adjusting for inflation.
The prices are still comparable when adjusting for inflation.
Here in Japan, it would seem almost impossible. Just recently build a house. It took almost as long to just get the approval from the city vs the time to build. Additionally, AFAIK you are technically not allowed to touch anything with electricity or water without license. Forget about connecting to the city grid.
But nothing's stopping you from buying one of these and hiring a professional to do the build. Would still be much cheaper than buying a property with a home on it already.
Building involves a surprising number of large one-off costs: clearing the land, excavation, running utilities, digging a well, installing a septic field, getting permits and inspections, legal fees for contract review, etc. None of these are reflected in the market price of a middle class SFH. This is the main reason housing developments are so popular, the developer is able to amortize these startup costs over 30-50 houses all at once which is the only way they can build new houses that are price competitive with the rest of the market.
All in, he spent around $300k including the plot.
Then COVID happened. Now, similar houses on his street sell north of 800k.
So $300k plus a ton of skilled labor. That's a lot more than just $300k.
It's just that a lot of existing housing is out of date (so prices below new construction) and people work to profit by reducing them below what an individual can achieve working on their own.
In my small town, houses that are "move in ready" command a premium, because higher end buyers are less willing to put up with the typical condition of the aging housing stock.
Connecting to the grid might be different though - I've never had to mess with that.
My main panel, outside, is effectively "half mine, half the power company's." The side with the meter in it is tagged off and I can't get into it without going through power company indicators. But everything on the other side, with the breakers, is my problem. Then everything from the box out to the pole transformer is the power company's problem.
Again, this isn't going to be broadly true everywhere, but that's the usual breakdown of things, and outside a few areas in the US, you are legally permitted to do electrical work on your residence.
I mean, I did my own massive ground mount solar install, grid tied, without having to bother an electrician. It just required the normal permitting process and such.
Yes, but you're at the mercy of the discretion of and have to pay rent (metaphorically) to potentially a ton more parties than you would have 100yr ago. You're gonna need several (local, but perhaps 1-2 state depending on situation) government inspections all of which may involve having to track down some licensed professional and then pay them a fee for inspecting your work.
I think in a "normal" case you can expect to shell out for electrical, plumbing, sewer/septic, HVAC, plans/engineering, environmental BS depending on distance to regulated stuff (wetlands usually) inspections and sign offs. There's probably one or two things I'm forgetting and perhaps one or two can be omitted on a case by case basis. A bunch of municipalities are gonna add their own BS on top of "the usual" stuff, like permits for tree cutting, permits for a construction dumpster and whatnot.
And keep in mind, some of these parties are likely to go out of their way to try and f you one way or another and/or give you the runaround until you go away because they don't want to deal with homeowners, they want to deal with businesses.
Also worth nothing that some municipalities expect strict goose stepping compliance. Some really DGAF what individuals engaged in noncommercial development (i.e. building your own house with the intent to live in it) and so long as you're not building rickety garbage they would rather you just not call them until it's done (though obviously they can't say that).
In Michigan, you are absolutely allowed to do your own build on your own land. It just has to pass code inspection, and it has to pass at every stage. (i.e., they want to inspect structural/electrical/plumbing/hvac/etc, before you put drywall up, to ensure things are actually OK underneath, and then inspect it again after drywall is applied).
Getting utilities can be hard and expensive if you are building off-grid. But there are so many vacant lots that already have power+water+gas at the street, that you don't really have to do that unless you really want to live in a specific off-grid location. (Suburbs and some townships make a lot of their money from this, so they usually want you building near their pre-existing utilities and hooking up to it)
Sewage tends to be the hardest part -- some places have "most" utilities, but not waste & water. And people assume they can just put in a leech field "septic tank", but since most of the state is already swampland, you have to be careful of how and where you put that, so you don't poison the water. (They will make you get a land survey to prove your location is safe to leech from, and they will inspect your install, and yes people complain all the time about it, but when they didn't do this, people did poison the water all the time, and then accidentally drank their own waste water and make themselves sick, or accidentally poisoned their neighbors water and made those folks sick, etc).
People complain about the licensing and permitting and inspections, but honestly, it's all been extremely fair and pretty quick and cheap. If you aren't passing your inspections here, you're likely doing something grossly negligent (or are about to do something grossly negligent).
.. are truly crooked in many wealthy areas of California (and elsewhere) today. Everyone directly involved benefits from it, the only direct loser is the newcomer..
source: San Francisco residential remodels
At one point, after about 5 years of me living there, there had been a leak under the sink in the bathroom and at the same time the stove also went out (within the same month). We were doing better financially so we decided to take this as an opportunity to renovate the mother-in-law suite as it was starting to show its' age. We wanted to improve the bathroom significantly (remove the tub and add a walk-in shower), update the very dated materials, and add a gas-line to the stove (since the main kitchen upstairs had a gas stove already, and the gas water heater was on the opposite side of a wall where the mother-in-law stove goes).
Anyway, we had a plumber come out and quote the work and he wanted to get a permit for the work. That was fine, I wasn't intending to do anything shady, so we requested a build permit and the inspector came out and told us we weren't supposed to have anything in the basement at all. No kitchen, no side entry doorway, no bathroom, no two bedrooms, no kitchen. The entire mother-in-law suite was around 1,000 sqft, it wasn't insignificant, and he was saying the previous owner never permitted it.
We basically got notice from the city that our house was illegal and could be condemned if we didn't first pay permitting and get inspections on the current home, before we do any new work. Keep in mind, I had owned this home for over 5 years when this was happening, I never did the original work, and the original work was now so old it needed to be replaced and updated. The plumber estimated by the plumbing work and code it was built to that it had to have been built at least 20 years prior. Based on the materials and designs of things like vanities, tilework, trim, kitchen finishes, etc I would have estimated that it was also about 20 years old.
So yeah we basically got extorted to pay the permitting for work that was so old it was now being replaced. Then we had to do the same thing again for the replacement work. Then on top of that, then next year our house was assessed at $180k more money, increasing property taxes significantly. This was in ~2016.
No guarantee of course that there would be something similar in your area, let alone accessible anonymously. Not to mention that maybe it wasn't obvious that the in-law was an addition, and that it's civilized to assume that the previous owners didn't cheat.
The rules vary by state (50), by county (Ohio alone has 87 counties), and municipality (if in a city) or township (if rural), and/or other AHJ. There are thousands of combinations of rules so it's hard to generalize beyond "Yes, it's possible."
Some areas have very strict zoning, building codes, and inspections. These can be challenging to build in, with oversight over many details, but it can be done and people do accomplish building homes all the time in these conditions.
Meanwhile, some other areas have no zoning at all and only the most rudimentary of building codes (rudimentary like "There must be a working sewer connection or septic system" and approximately no other requirements). As a practical matter, in these places a person who owns some land can build what they want and nobody is empowered to tell them not to.
And, of course: There's a myriad of in-between variations.
What should I be searching for to find these generally?