COST OF HOUSE BUILDING

Marlborough Express, Volume LIII, Issue 187, 4 July 1919, Page 7

COST OF HOUSE BUILDING

ANALYSIS OF ALL ITEMS

TIMBER A SMALL FACTOR

A detailed analysis of the cost of house building has been made by a resident in a large provincial town in the Wellington district, on the Main Trunk line.

"Requiring a residence of six noms, I instructed an architect to prepare plans and call for tenders," he writes. "Five were received, the lowest at £1175, the others ranging up to £1450. On acceptance they placed the order for the whole""of the timber with my firm, and I enclose this order, totalling ±262. You will rote that in this building, costing £1175 (plus architect's fee, £60), the timber is a very small factor connected with the high cost. Further, the cost of the same timber in pre-war times would- be approximately £60 less than at prasent, and this sum, £60, therefore represents the actual amount of the increase on the building to-day for which timber is responsible. ■ - * •

"Deducting the £262 from £1175, we have a balance of £913, representing other material (iron, paint, paper, scrim, glass, bricks, hardware, etc.), and it is quite clear that, these articles, which have advanced probably on the average of quite 250 per cent, coupled with the much higher wages ruling, are responsible for the high cost of building at the present time."

The cost of the timber was equivalent to £43 13s 4d a room. The architect's fees ran into £76 los (£l2 ilss a room); labor, joinery, bricks and brick-laying, plumbing, and builder's profit, £901 9s Sd (£l5O 5s a room). The architect's fee would b© made up of 5 per cent, from the owner, £58 15s, and i£ per cent. from 'the builder, £18, so that the owner actually pays the amount of the tender, pius the £58 15s, which makes up the cost of the six-roomed \vooden\iioase to ,£1233-los.

- The above figures endorse the statement by the representative^ of a shingle (gravel> and. sand firm in Wellington, who contended that enough shinglo (from the bed of the Hutt River) .for the erection of a sixroomed concrete house could be delivered almost any where' in Wellington at a. cost, of £30, his contention being that it was not the price of the principal building material that was responsible for ,the high cost of building, but that profit was being made on a scale out of all proportion to that with which contractors were content before the war.