2 August 2026 · Paragon Portables
The home is the number people quote. It is rarely the number that matters. Here is the full list of what sits between a price on a website and a home you can move into.
Every transportable home company in the country publishes a price. Almost none of them publish the rest of it, which is how people end up thirty thousand dollars into a project they thought they had budgeted.
This is not a criticism of the industry. The home genuinely is a fixed number — ours are. The site is not, and it cannot be, because nobody can price your ground without looking at it. But you can know the shape of the list, and most people are never shown it.
The home
This is the fixed part. Framing, cladding, roofing, insulation, joinery, kitchen, bathroom, the fit-out and the finishes you selected. On our builds it is itemised and agreed before anything is ordered, and it does not move afterwards unless you change something.
Everything else
- Geotechnical report — someone has to test what your ground is actually made of.
- Engineering — a foundation designed for that ground, and the producer statements to go with it.
- Consent fees — council charges, inspections and, on some sites, development contributions.
- Site works — clearing, levelling, and access for a truck that is longer than you think.
- Piles or foundations — the single most variable line on the list. Good ground is cheap. Bad ground is not.
- Transport — priced on distance and on how hard the last two hundred metres are.
- Craning — sometimes not needed at all, sometimes the biggest single day of the project.
- Services — power, water, and the wastewater system, which on an unserviced rural site is its own project.
- Decking, steps and landscaping — the bit everyone forgets and everyone wants.
Where the money actually goes wrong
In our experience it is almost always one of three things. The ground turns out to be worse than anyone assumed, so the foundation design gets expensive. The wastewater solution is more involved than expected, particularly on rural blocks without a connection. Or access is genuinely difficult, and a job that could have been a truck and a hiab becomes a truck, a crane and a traffic management plan.
None of those are surprises if someone goes and looks first. All three are expensive surprises if nobody does.
What full project management changes
You can absolutely arrange the site work yourself, and some people do. What you are taking on is the coordination: the geotech before the engineer, the engineer before the consent, the consent before the piles, the piles before the delivery date, and the crane booked for a day the truck can actually arrive.
When we manage the whole project, all of that sits on one programme with one person answering the phone. That is not free — but neither is a crane that turns up on a day the drainlayer has not finished.
Next step
Send us the address and we will look at it properly.
General guidance only gets you so far. Everything on this page changes once someone looks at your actual site — and that conversation costs nothing.
