Transportable or built on site: where the money actually goes

We build transportable homes, so treat the following with appropriate suspicion. But we also turn work away when a site does not suit us, and the honest version of this comparison is more useful to you than the flattering one.

What building off site is genuinely better at

• Weather. A frame that never gets rained on is a better frame. Ours are built under cover.
• Time on your land. Site work is measured in days or weeks, not seasons.
• Price certainty. A controlled workshop with a known process prices much more tightly than a site with weather and access risk in it.
• Hard sites. Steep, remote, narrow, unserviced — the places conventional building hates are exactly where arriving finished is worth the most.
• Supervision. The same people build every home, in one place, all the time.

What building on site is genuinely better at

If you are in one of those three situations, we will tell you. It is a shorter conversation than the alternative.

• Size. There is a width a truck can legally carry. Past a certain footprint, on-site building stops competing and starts winning.
• Complex geometry. Wrapping around an existing building, following a difficult contour, or a shape that cannot be split into transportable modules.
• Sites a truck cannot reach. If the last stretch is genuinely impassable, no amount of clever building solves it.

The comparison people make that does not hold

The one we hear most often is that a transportable home is built to a lower standard because it has to survive a truck ride. It is the opposite. A building that has to be lifted, carried and craned is engineered for loads a fixed house never sees, and then it sits on its piles for the rest of its life having already survived the worst day it will ever have.

Both approaches are consented to the same Building Code. Ours is built to NZS 3604:2011, seismically braced, and inspected the same way any house is.