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What in the dystopian hell?! 350-square-foot tiny homes…
“You can rent the homes out, cover your mortgage, and get income each month,” he notes. “Those homes can be leased out for a minimum of $1,300 a month.”
Mata says investors rushed in from all over the country, especially from California.
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Why would you even build these as stand-alone houses. Homes of this size make far more sense as apartments
Give me trailers but worse and with extra steps
I built and lived in a tiny home for 7 years. It cost me 8,000 to build and I paid $500/m to rent the land it was on, all utilities included.
This same outrageous pricing is happening all over the country. Business owners just see a way to squeeze us over and over.
Goddamn. And what mostly kills me about “tiny homes” is that, like… prefabs exist! Mobile homes exist! They’ve existed for a long time! But the cultural divide and associated stigma that has been cultivated by dipshits like David Brooks and his ilk has led a huge number of people to believe they’re too good for “trailer” living, so they opt to pay thru the nose for very little additional benefit.
Mobile homes and manufactured homes (depends what kind) don’t appreciate in value in the same way conventional construction homes do. They act more like cars and trucks in a purely financial sense, in that they lose value pretty rapidly.
Home ownership is one of the last remaining vehicles of generational wealth available to most people. There is indeed prejudice around living in a “trailer”, but many more would do so if they acted more like other real estate in a financial sense.
There are other issues too, like lack of repairability, having to get custom-fitted appliances/HVAC and the overall lack of durability. I definitely understand the appeal for those who can’t afford something else, but categorically they are temporary housing and will be very expensive to maintain in the long run without any of the added financial benefits that come with owning a conventional home. And that’s not even covering the topic of lot rent.
Mobile home owner here. I’m pretty sure that most of their bad reputation as an investment is because most of them do not come with the land, but if they do come with the land, then as an asset they will behave more like other real estate. The main thing that is valuable about a home is that it confers the legal right and practical ability to live in that location, but mobile homes placed on rented land categorically do not.
To address the other points (warning: c/dull_mens_club style content ahead):
To give an example of a repair task related to custom appliances: The water heater broke, and replacing it was complicated by the differences between normal and mobile home water heaters; the latter are smaller, and the cold water intake pipe is on the bottom rather than the top. I had to downgrade to a slightly smaller, mobile home approved tank because the previous one was a regular water heater too large to be up to code as it is placed in a small contained closet and there are clearance requirements. The floor underneath it also needed some repairs, which were fairly simple. All of the plumbing, electrical wiring, and joists underneath the floor can be accessed from the crawlspace by cutting through the wrap material and insulation with a utility knife, and then stapled/taped up when done, which is a little awkward given the lack of space, but everything is accessible without that much difficulty. The cost of the whole replacement was mostly the tank itself, which was more expensive than a comparable non-mobile-home water heater, but only by $100 or so.
Overall, the thing is a really simple single story structure, and compared to what I saw my parents go through trying to maintain an old farmhouse it seems like easy mode.
$1,300 a month minimum for 32.5 square meters is a very expensive garage
Damn, makes my £1300 mortgage+tax a month sound rather cheap for 60m² on the south coast. But our house was originally 3 bedroom, 1 being merged into making a larger living room means it’s only 2 bedroom since we got it.
good call, 3 bedrooms in 60m2 must have been cramped
Its a bungalow which helps, no stairs taking up space from that 60m². Good loft space though, quite a few people around us have built up into it to get more space.
I used to be intrigued by tiny homes. They’re enough room for one or two people, but not a place I’d try to raise a kid.
I recently went from a 3k sq ft US home to a 1100sq ft apartment and this apartment feels big. The difference mostly centers around how much furniture and other home maintenance materials I used to have.
It also helps that we moved to a European city so we don’t have a car and related support equipment.
Looking at a 350 sq ft tiny home, if it was just down to myself and a partner, we could do it. The whole goal would be to not spent huge amounts of time at home, but to go to 3rd places and hobbies away from home. Rural or suburban living makes that harder than where we’re at now, but it’s doable.
The homes run as small as 350 square feet.
Mata, who says all the 12 tiny homes he repped sold in less than a year, tells Realtor.com that the typical buyer was a single individual, often a college student or downsizing older person.
That’s small relative to US houses today, but even the smallest size they have there is 60% larger on a per capita basis, if there’s an individual resident, than houses were in 1900 in the US.
https://www.windermere.com/blog/how-the-american-home-has-evolved
Owning a home has been an American tradition from the start. But the home itself has changed dramatically over the years.
For example, you may be surprised to learn how much the size of the average American home has increased since the turn of the 20th century—especially when you compare it to the size of the average family during the same time period.
In the year 1900, the average American family was relatively large with 4.6 members, but the average home featured just 1,000 square feet of usable floor space. By 1979, family size had shrunk to 3.11 members, but the floor space they shared had expanded to 1,660 square feet. And by 2007, the average family size was even smaller still—just 2.6 members—while the average home size had increased by the largest amount yet—this time to 2,521 square feet.
In 1900, 217 square feet per capita.
It’s small relative to houses back then too. I don’t think there were many 217 sqft houses, we just had more people per household back then.
Per capita is a bit odd for measuring the space in a house too. 5 people don’t need 5 kitchens and bathrooms
If these were ADU’s or something similar, I’d respect them more. This just looks like typical suburbia but with tiny homes.
I question why this couldn’t be a set of apartments.
I question why this couldn’t be a set of apartments.
Yeah, apartment/condo buildings should be the goto rather than tiny homes. The “shared walls” issue is really a “stop cheaping out on sound insulation” issue.
I question why this couldn’t be a set of apartments
Zoning laws, these could still qualify as free standing single family housing, which in Texas is probably required for most suburbs.
