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I just read your article about the lovely little 1076 s/f house built locally of concrete prefab panels. I see the Capresa $9,000 materials amount. I understand the cost of poured concrete, if in fact it was delivered by truck, but $70,000 for a completed house, no land involved in the price is $65 s/f. ?? Could we have a little dialogue here for others comment?? 😕
Most prefabs run 350-400 USD/m2 in this case it is $700 m2.
Land goes up in five years, sure, but the cost of materials and labor both usually don’t double. I’m not saying the house is not worh it, it appears to be a nice house. At the beach area, OK. Costa Rica Bill’s comments are good.He bought three parcels of land totaling 9.5 acres for $120,000 so, if they are of equal size (which is not specified) he has a 3 acre lot for about $40,000
$40,000 for the land plus $70,000 for the completed house is a total investment of US$110,000 and in that area his property taxes are probably $3.99 per annum 🙂
Isn’t that very reasonable?
Or is that not what you’re asking…. Perhaps you could help us out by being a bit more specific?
Scott
It would be interesting to see the floorplan. From the pictures it appears that the “outside under roof area” comprises 25-30% of the total area under roof, so assuming that to be true that leaves less than 800sf to house the 3 bedrooms, 2 baths, kitchen, and living area. I know it can be done, but that is a lot of rooms for less than 800sf.
They did do some very nice adds to the house, with the wood ceilings, polished concrete floors, window trim, etc.
$40k for three acres and about $70 per sq ft construction cost seems pretty reasonable from what I have read. Of course, the location and accessibility to infrastructure and so many other factors would have much to do with that. For example, I don’t think I could be comfortable at 300 meters without air conditioning and that would be more important than a sea view.
Land pricing in Costa Rica remains a mystery to me. I suppose it is open to so many subjective factors that it is difficult to discern at first but it seems to me that construction costs should be pretty objective and easy to judge. How much more should be considered besides material, labor and transportation costs?
Hi everyone,
I was very pleased to see this article on the website as i have very similar goals in mind in terms of the area and construction. I was very pleased to see his costs for the pre-fab walls, seems very easy to construct/modify.
After visiting the St.Tereasa/Mal Pais area for the last 7 years and watching real estate prices closely i can tell you (but i’m sure most ppl here know) that land costs in this area are very high, probably higher than most coastal towns.
IMO, i think this person got a very good deal at 40k for 3 acres. As a comparison, you can find tiny ocean view lost (500m2) for around 40k. but as he says, on a slope, and not very many trees.
Prices haven’t really gone up or down in this area and they seem to (empty lots anyway) stay on the market for quite a while. In response to the question about $/sq.ft i think you have to consider transportation costs, this is a very rugged area with steep hills and poor poor roads. I would imagine transport would be very high.
Also, i didn’t see anything written about infrastructure, wether water/hydro was in place or not. They could be on municipal water/well water or a cistern.
My curiosity is with the construction costs, i’m wondering specifically what his topography is and how it affected transport costs. Also, labour rates and most importantly his cost for the concrete? These to me seem to be the biggest hurdles.
Perhaps we could get some insight from the home owner. I’d love to get his contacts info for the labour, architect, etc. as this is an area that i’d like to build in one day.
I’ve also been to the playa San Miguel area up the coast and love the remoteness and opportunity to get in early. However, land is mostly farms with little to no small lots (ocean view) in my price range.
I’m a younger person so these are long term goals for me. I’m good at home construction here in Canada and my hopes are to aquire land first (did i mention i’m poor lol) then build the home myself (with some tico help of course!) gotta learn more spanish first tho 🙂
tnx,
-IanI have seen first hand results from a couple of these slide together homes when constructed in an area which has often occurring strong winds. Cracking does occur.
[quote=”costaricafinca”]I have seen first hand results from a couple of these slide together homes when constructed in an area which has often occurring strong winds. Cracking does occur.[/quote]
It would be interesting to know just how much of a cost difference exists between traditional cement block construction and pre fab cement component construction.
I have been a custom homebuilder for 30 years and since 1992 I’ve been building and inspecting housing in CR. Over the years, I’ve successfully utilized several construction methods; Wood frame, steel frame and concrete block.
I’ve seen pre-fab concrete panels utilized for construction not considered “living areas,” such as storage rooms and privacy walls and in those installations the purchasers were satisfied with the results.
I’ve been hired by several foreigners to inspect the construction of prefab homes and most purchasers were not satisfied with the finishing of the walls and the lack of electrical, cable TV, and telephone outlets inside the walls.
The initial cost and time to assemble the pre-fab packages is attractive. However, unless you’ve worked with a lot of concrete finish construction, you could not anticipate the challenges to finish the plastering of the interior and exterior walls.
Unfortunately, for the owners, the costs to finish these thin wall panel, prefab designs has always been more costly and time consuming than they anticipated because the purchaser was envisioning smooth finished walls like they have been accustomed to living in for most of their lives.
Additionally, the thin electrical conduits are pre-installed in the columns so the location of your electric plugs is limited by where you position the columns.
The finished panels and posts have a difference of 1″ to 2″ that needs to be compensated for with plaster in the rooms that you would like to be smooth finished.
Perhaps in your garage it would not be important to have normal looking smooth plastered walls but most folks want to live in finished rooms.
Don’t forget the pre-cast wall panels are only 4″ thick versus block walls of at least 8″ thickness.
Remember, just like with anything else, anywhere in the world, you get what you pay for.
Hi everyone. I’m the owner of the house being discussed. Thanks for your interest in our project!
One of the writers asked to see the floor plan. This prompted me to review the dimensions of the house again, and I find I made an error.
The 100 sq meters that I quoted was the area of the floor plan inside the walls, not the total area.
Due to the large porches and sidewalks, the area of construction (and the area covered by the roof) was actually 218 sq meters. Costaricabill was right. There would not have been enough space for all those rooms.
Sorry. This means the cost of construction was about $321 per sq meter, or about $30 per sq foot. Keep in mind that our architect charged us less than he would normally, since he is a relative, and my son-in-law charged us nothing for his many many hours of labor.
This all kept the cost down.
I’ve just uploaded a scan of the floor plan to the “Your Costa Rica Photographs” section at
[ https://www.welovecostarica.com/members/viewimage.cfm?ImgID=902 ]
It’s entitled “Capresa Plan”. It totaled 90.65 sq meters. After we added the extra meter to the long dimension, it came to about 99 sq meters. We use the “Sala T.V.” area as an office.
The “Area De Milas” is outside but covered by the roof, and is where we have a washer, dryer, and an outdoor sink. The only room which seems a bit small to me is the second bathroom.
Crhomebuilder mentioned concerns about the finishing of the walls. We purposely picked Capresa because the walls do not have thick posts connected by thin panels.
We saw homes like that near us and didn’t like the way they looked. The Capresa walls are just interlocking panels, and are pretty smooth when assembled.
Our builder smeared the outside with a coating of concrete, and a finer coating of plaster inside. Then we painted them. I can tell you that outside they look like stucco, and inside like painted wallboard. I uploaded an additional photo (“Side view of house”) at
[ https://www.welovecostarica.com/members/viewimage.cfm?ImgID=903 ]
… so you can see that all the walls are smooth.
We had complete freedom about where to put electric plugs and switches. Our architect showed Capresa where we wanted them, and they supplied panels with conduits in place for each of those locations. All the wiring is hidden above the ceiling.
Plumbing is another matter. The panels are too narrow for pipes, so they are attached to the surface of the panels. In the showers, the builder created a thicker section using tile to hide the pipes.
We were very fortunate in getting our property at the price we paid. The owner was a friend of my daughter and son-in-law, and was anxious to raise some money. He sold us the first parcel (about 6 acres) for about $10,000 per acre (about $2.50 per sq meter).
When we expressed interest in the other two parcels, the price per square meter for them was considerably higher, but we went for them anyway because it still averaged out OK.
This area is very hilly and the private road leading to our property is pretty bad, as Skilligan predicted. The only major problem this caused was when Capresa tried to deliver the panels.
We told them to bring them in several small trucks, but they did not. Their truck almost got stuck, and damaged part of the road. We’re still trying to fix it. The rest of the concrete was brought in by the builder a little at a time, which was no trouble.
The property had an existing artesian well which we deepened to about 7 meters by hand; it’s been serving us well so far. We pump the water up to a water tank which our builder put up.
There was no electricity on the property and no nearby electric poles. We thought about going solar (we have a hillside that would be ideal for solar panels), but in the interest of keeping things simple we asked the power company install a box for us on the nearest public road and ran a line to it thru our neighbor’s property, attaching it to the trees. (We got his permission first!) We had to pay about $1500 for the wire alone.
I’ll try to answer more of your questions when I have a little more time.
Mitch
[quote=”olmurabis”]
This means the cost of construction was about $321 per sq meter, or about $30 per sq foot. (This is actually about 50 per cent more than I expected it to cost. The various upgrades really added up to a lot.)
[/quote]Hi Mitch, thanks for the additional information – but your response prompts another question….
If the price ($70,000) didn’t change, but the constructed area was actually larger, wouldn’t that result in the price per square meter being reduced, rather than increased?
I think $68/sf for the “inside area” and $31/sf for total area is pretty darn good.
And I am glad I could help you get all that extra area without it costing either of us any more money!!!
[quote=”olmurabis”]It did reduce. It went from $700/sq meter down to $321/sq meter.[/quote]
I was responding to your posting before it was edited (after my response).
Before it was edited (changed) it read “(This is actually about 50 per cent more than I expected it to cost. The various upgrades really added up to a lot.)”
Yes. I didn’t mean to cause confusion. I kept editing my original post for awhile.
What I was trying to say was that even though $70K sounds like very little to spend on a 200+ sq meter house, it could have easily cost even less. For example:
Originally we hadn’t planned to finish the interior walls with plaster. We hadn’t planned to line the outer roof areas with teak. We originally were going to put inexpensive tile on the floors.
The 3 bedrooms actually have teak floors (see photo “Bedroom floor of our house” which I have uploaded). This is a really nice upgrade but was definitely more expensive than tile.
The window openings of the Capresa house had bottom sills that were closer to the ground; this bothered us aesthetically, so we had the builder raise them about 8 inches by pouring concrete into wooden forms.
The window in the kitchen seemed a little small, so we asked the builder to widen it by about a foot by cutting away part of a panel. He also modified the width of several doorways and made other similar changes for us.
The fancy bases at the bottoms of the columns were another change which added to the cost.
If our lot had been located in a more established area, we would not have had to pay for installing a septic system, deepening the well, and connecting to a distant electric pole. These easily added several thousand dollars to the final cost.
[i]“We had complete freedom about where to put electric plugs and switches. Our architect showed Capresa where we wanted them, and they supplied panels with conduits in place for each of those locations. All the wiring is hidden above the ceiling.
Plumbing is another matter. The panels are too narrow for pipes, so they are attached to the surface of the panels. In the showers, the builder created a thicker section using tile to hide the pipes.”[/i]
This does not make sense. The basic PVC tubes for electric and water are both 1/2 inch thick. I wonder why they were able to install the electrical conduits inside the walls but the water tubes had to be installed on the interior surface of the walls. I utilize 3/4 inch electric conduits because when installing three properly sized electric cables, there’s more flexibility to pull the cables through curves and into the outlet boxes. Perhaps they only installed two electric cables to each outlet and your plugs are not grounded?
[/quote][i]“There was no electricity on the property and no nearby electric poles. We thought about going solar (we have a hillside that would be ideal for solar panels), but in the interest of keeping things simple we asked the power company install a box for us on the nearest public road and ran a line to it thru our neighbor’s property, attaching it to the trees. (We got his permission first!) We had to pay about $1500 for the wire alone.”[/i]
Electric cables strung through the trees??? That is not permitted in most of CR. Even when I built in GTE in the early 90’s the power company would not connect electricity to a dwelling without a legal right of way (servidumbre) for them to install their poles or in underground conduits. What electric company provides your electricity?
[/quote]
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