In a housing market becoming more competitive, restrictive and expensive every day, more and more individuals, couples and families looking for a new home are choosing to skip the endless house viewings and buying land on which to build their own homes. However, building a home from scratch in this way can take a very long time if your building is erected using conventional methods -- hardly ideal if you've already managed to sell your previous abode.

To speed up the process of building a custom home from scratch, erecting a prefabricated home can be a very enticing prospect. These homes are unique in that they are almost entirely constructed within factories, and are shipped to your land in large pieces which can be assembled into a complete home within a matter of weeks.

This thoroughly modern approach to home building can have a number of advantages over more traditional homebuilding techniques, but there are also some drawbacks associated with choosing prefabricated homes. As such, it's important to familiarise yourself with the pros and cons of prefabricated homes before you invest in one for your land.

What are the advantages of prefabricated homes?

Quick to build

As you can imagine, a home already partially assembled before it even arrives at your location is much quicker to build than a home constructed from scratch, and prefabricated homes are ideal if you need a new roof over your head as speedily as possible. This makes them ideal for home builders who have sold their previous homes to buy land and finance their projects.

Inexpensive

Building a home of your own is never what you'd call cheap, but prefabricated homes tend to offer more for less when compared to traditionally build homes. This is largely due to the much shorter construction period, which significantly lowers the cost of hiring builders and construction equipment to assemble your home.

High quality

Because your home is partially constructed within an enclosed, factory environment, you can rest assured that it will be constructed to extremely high standards. In this controlled environment, prefab builders have access to advanced equipment and tools, and the building materials used will not be exposed to inclement weather and excessive humidity which can lower build quality.

Ideal for isolated areas

Prefabricated homes are especially useful if you are building the home of your dreams in an isolated rural area, where conventional builders would spend half their time ferrying building materials to and from your land. By contrast, all the tools and equipment needed to assemble a prefab home can be brought to your site in a few trips, allowing your builders to focus fully on their work and significantly lowering transportation costs.

What about the disadvantages of prefabricated homes?

Limited in size

Since prefab homes are transported by road in large sections, they are somewhat limited in size by the capacity of the roads surrounding your land. Splitting larger homes into smaller sections to ease transportation is a potential solution, but will raise your transportation costs significantly.

Difficult to finance

You may have trouble financing your prefabricated home with a conventional mortgage. This is because many banks will not finance a construction project until foundations have been laid and construction work on the actual site your home will be built on has begun, so you may need to shoulder the costs of initial construction yourself.