Here's a "kit" for a 1,400 sq ft house: https://www.menards.com/main/building-materials/books-buildi...
$90k for materials.
Around here a 1,400 square goes for $385k (half a house, but there you go).
So materials are somewhere around a quarter of the cost. Land + foundation + utilities is another quarter; the rest is labor and profit.
The land, foundation, and utilities (often in the form of impact fees) are largely fixed costs regardless of home size. The larger the home one builds the less impact they have on the final cost to build. This is why “starter homes” don’t get built anymore. The builder has every incentive to build that 3,000 sq ft home on a small lot instead of something more reasonable in size.
Also, other options that used to be more efficient to build multiple homes at once, like row houses or duplexes/triplexes, are generally directly or indirectly illegal to build in most US cities now. Row houses and brownstones were the cheap-and-fast housing option once upon a time; they're now rare and expensive because in most places nobody's allowed to put up a new one.
I've seen sixplexes around here, but unless they're apartment buildings (which have better designs anyway) they're relatively undesirable.
A duplex saves you some coin, but each additional house you stick on the side saves you less, and the desirability goes down. People don't like duplex/triplex/sixplex living.
Yes very true, and lumber is a sub-category inside materials and it is not very expensive compared to the other materials like concrete, siding (fiber cement, stucco), roof material (metal, asphalt, tile), drywall, paint, plumbing, electrical. Of all those things lumber is a cheap line item.
to be fair, xnx said "dozens of factors" and mentioned lumber and tariffs as among them... maybe better examples would've made their point stronger though.
Yes that’s true, I think he’s right on all the other points.
I just built a house by myself, from the ground up, so I couldn’t let that lumber thing slide though as I literally just paid for all the materials myself and I know how little lumber costs compared to everything else.
Also the tariffs are new this year, housing costs have been a problem for much longer than just this year.