Prefab wooden houses: a booming business in Czechia
The market with prefabricated wooden houses in the Czech Republic is experiencing a major boom, the website ihned.cz reports. While ten years ago, there were around one thousand prefabricated wooden houses built in the country, last year it was nearly three thousand. “Over the past year, the demand has grown by one fifth,” Martin Fojtíko of the company Bidli, which specializes in low-energy wooden buildings, told the website.
Compared to brick houses, prefabricated wooden houses are also considerably faster to build. The assembling of the prefabricated wooden blocks usually takes only about three months. However, providers are not able to meet the growing demand and clients have to wait at least half a year to place their order.
The biggest supplier of wooden buildings, Bruntál-based company RD Rýmařov, produces around 400 houses a year.
“The demand is so huge that we are no longer able to cover it. We had to stop accepting orders for the next two years,” the company boss Jiří Pohloudek told the website ihned.cz.
The biggest interest in wooden prefab houses is in the vicinity of large cities, including Prague, Brno and Ostrava, where prices of flats are often out of reach for most people.
An average wooden house with an area 150 square meters costs around three million crowns, while in Prague, that it is price of a small one-room apartment.
Besides traditional family houses, Czechs are also increasingly interested in log cabins, which make up about 12 percent of all the overall production of wooden houses. According to real estate agents, there is also a growing interest in old wooden houses.
According to real-estate agents, most clients interested in purchasing wooden houses are people between the ages of 30 to 40, who are mainly interested in low-energy houses of up to three million crowns.
The average life-span of a wooden house is currently around 50 years. After this period, the house usually needs to undergo some major renovation.
