I was wondering if anybody new of a national average cost breakdown on amount spent for building homes in the 200,000 range. Specificaly broken down into catagories such as windows, kitchens, baths, framing, roofing etc? Does such a monster exist?
AB
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Replies
AB-
There's such a wide variation in costs depending upon the level of finish in the house, size of house, etc. For $200,000 here in NJ, you can't even BUY a new house any more. In other areas of the country, $200,000 gets you a 3,000 SF house with granite countertops, 10' ceilings, etc. Based on that, it would be tough to produce a "national average" that had much relevance to anything.
What part of the country are you from?
Bob
Bob, thanks for the reply. I live in the Pacific Northwest. Good point about the vast range of costs nationaly. Do you know if any organization collects this data on a regional basis?
Means has a square foot cost book for residential, which lists costs by "system", but I don't think it gets much more detailed than that. It may give a cost for plumbing, but probably not fixtures, roughin, etc. Take their costs with a grain of salt though- I've found them to be way off base at times.
Bob
Great Bob I will check into it. Thanks again for the tip.
I'll second that. Means gathers data from contractors all over and uses averages that data generates to formulate their price lines. They do have a pretty wide variety of books which are at least intended to fit specific needs. Much of the data is given in Assembly costs, which is to say "Wall, 8', 2x4 framed, 16"OC, insulated, rocked, painted" $XX per sf. You get a number, say it's $55, then you go to the back and find your area of the country and another number which adjusts the cost. So if your number is 150%, you're about 150% on average over the National average.
But there's also item by item guides which might get you a little closer to what you're looking for. Sometimes they're dead on, sometimes not so much. Here, our costs for things like partition walls go for real close to the national average given in the books, even though they say we're charging only 60% of that. If painters painted on what they said we got here, they'd all be on welfare. It's worth a look, but expect to pay some dollars for the guides
http://www.rsmeans.com
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You might want to play with this calculator. You specify the area and the type of details that you want. I don't think that it includes land.
http://building-cost.net/
Bill cool calculator. Thanks.