Relocating a home may seem an affordable answer to the housing crisis, but the path can be strewn with obstacles, Richard Wood explains.
A mate of mine called his house-moving contractor the other day to get a date for his job and was told: "Sorry, we have 72 ahead of yours, so we can't give you a date."
That was just one company riding the house-relocating boom in New Zealand, and illustrates why TVNZ took on Clarke Gayford's 12-episode series, Moving Houses. There's big bucks in it.
There are house-moving contractors in every major centre, all competing for listings. Business is brisk due to the high cost of building new or just buying an existing house, and because most of our houses are wooden and moveable. The sophisticated lifting and trucking technology used has been developed here and is sold worldwide.
The TV series was pretty "gee-whizz", tackling all kinds of terrain for every imaginable end result. The reality for the customer can be quite different.
The house-moving business is visually dramatic, and every good keen DIYer harbours dreams of doing a relocation project, thinking it looks fairly straightforward and cheaper than building a house. Sometimes it is.
There is nothing quite like that pre-dawn phone call from the pilot vehicle: "Your house is on the move as we speak!" Or the moment, probably watched with a crowd of friends and neighbours, when the convoy of trucks, illuminated by banks of flashing lights, carrying your precious payload roars up your street just as the sun is rising.
There is no doubt that if you get the mix right, and you have the knowledge, tools and practical skills, it's a project that can be satisfying and cost effective. But it's not all what it seems, and things can go wrong.
I'm no expert on this topic, but I have done a few relocates and have learnt lots. This is not a bragging opportunity, nor a blow-by-blow description. It's about some of the realities of relocating – the highs and lows, how to choose, negotiate, minimise risks and damage, and how to stay in charge – because you are the one paying.
You need either to own a piece of land big enough to put an extra house on, or find a suitable section for that purpose.
Accessible sites in urban areas are extremely scarce, and vacant sections will usually have something wrong with them, such as an old rubbish tip, or a buried sawmill site. I've had both.
Rural properties have plenty of sites but not everyone wants a lifestyle block, and they are far more costly than a town lot.
It's no use looking for something in a subdivision with restrictive covenants preventing relocated used houses. And don't overlook a new transportable house: this industry is pumping them out and they are good quality, but in a different price league.
You can pretty much pick and choose your building, because the used relocatable-house market is glutted with stock in the major centres due to two factors: the amount of urban redevelopment going on around the country and the number of competing house-moving contractors.
The best way to buy a used house is direct from the owner. I've done this three times. You get to negotiate the price, you can see it as many times as you need to, and there's no GST to pay on the deal. If the house-moving company gets in first, you will pay more, and 15 per cent GST on top.
The best used house to buy is one that has not yet been moved. This will be less stressful, and cheaper. A house for sale in a display yard will have been lifted on and off a transporter four times by the time it gets to your place.
However, the odds of being able to purchase from the owner are lengthening all the time because the house movers are in the real estate business: they want the listings, which puts them in a strong bargaining position. So they pitch aggressively for relocatables.
At the same time, with so much stock in their yards, it's possible to bargain the price down. You may even get a house for free. This happened to me when I came across a dairy farmer wanting an old villa gone so he could build a flash town place. I paid $15,000 for the shift and another $15,000 to replace the asbestos fibre roof.
My wife and I have found that, in essence, you have to declare your intention to the world and your house will come to you – eventually.
Don't rush into it, take your time; tell lots of people, watch the classifieds and online ads. Put an ad in the local papers and on social media. Ask builders – they often have inside knowledge.
We've located, purchased and moved a total of 11 houses and sheds and found them using all of the above methods. Only one was purchased from a house-moving company. What you buy depends to some extent on what you're going to use the house for. If it's for upgrade and resale for capital gain, you will need to spend more money, time and energy on the project than if it's going to be a rental. If you're going to live there yourself, you can compromise on some of the finishing details and complete it over a longer period.
It is also worth noting that the Inland Revenue Department is proposing to classify a used relocatable as a new build so, if you sell within five years of your building code compliance certificate, you will incur a capital gains tax on any profit (rather than within 10 years for other investment houses) and you will be permitted to deduct loan interest costs from your income tax assessment.
A large house will need to be cut into two or three sections, and that raises some issues about how well it's cut and how thoroughly it's rejoined; however, a large house that is longish and narrow (up to about 12m wide) can be done in one piece. Multi-level houses are too specialised to deal with here.
Concrete basements can't be moved, but a wooden one might.
A classic old villa in good nick might have two to three gorgeous fireplaces with chimneys – they have to be removed before shifting, leaving great gaping holes in walls, floor and roof.
Stucco houses (concrete cladding on netting) can be shifted without significantly cracking the cladding, but the contractor won't guarantee that. It depends on how well the stucco was applied.
Brick or similar cladding has to be removed, as do ceramic or concrete tile roofs, because of the extra weight and because the mortar joins break in the shifting. But don't let that stop you. If there's a good house underneath, it might be worth the extra cost of new cladding or roofing.
Be warned that if you come across a piece of urban land that has been sitting empty for many years, there is going to be something wrong with it. On the other hand, you can use that to talk the price down.
Before you buy, you need a geo-tech assessment of the site by a registered engineer.
If your engineer can't find a solid base for normal piling, the only way to go is with driven (ie: machine-hammered) piles. Driven piles can't be concreted in, so at least you will save on that cost. Of course, if the ground is firm and level, the house-moving company will do the piling as part of their contract with you. That price will be based on piles 600mm long and 150mm square in augered holes, concreted in.
If the house you intend to move is sitting on 70-80 piles (not uncommon under older houses), and they need to be 3m-4m long and driven by an approved contractor, that's going to add upwards of $10,000 to your costs. But if the land hasn't cost you too much, it should still be worth doing – particularly if it's the back part of a large section.
We've twice bought sites where we were told there could be old fill or soft ground. We didn't have them tested beforehand, but it worked out okay for us because ignorance can be bliss, and fortune sometimes favours the bold. Maybe, if we had done a proper investigation, we might have got cold feet.
Now, you might think it's pretty dumb not to have it checked out first, but pile-driving is nothing to be frightened about. These round piles are just big fence-strainer posts, and any fencing contractor with a decent hydraulic post driver is quite capable of handling them.
Unable to afford city prices, we bought in Eltham and Stratford, which are dairy farming towns. In both cases, we found large sections with an existing house and enough room to subdivide for a relocated one. The Eltham one was an old council dump site, the other a gully filled with sawmill debris.
The Eltham engineer's report said: "The site is at the head of a small gully that has been used for filling some 40 years ago. Unfortunately, uncompacted fill can take well over 100 years to compact to the stage that buildings can be erected on it without risk of excessive settlement.
"I suggest that piles be driven, starting nearest the street, as I assume they will increase in length towards the rear of the site. Once the 3.6m maximum pile length has been reached we will have a much better knowledge of the pile-driving conditions and be able to make realistic decisions."
In other words: I don't have a clue what's down there but it will require long piles. The bank was understanding and supportive.
For the Eltham one, I had a great find on Trade Me: a motor camp amenities block comprising a kitchen, lounge, laundry and a whole wing of toilets, showers and bathrooms. The cladding was ribbed Coloursteel and it was fully insulated – ceiling, walls and underfloor. The wet-area interiors were all lined with washable Seratone, and the floors had industrial-grade vinyl.
The purchase price was $25,000 and the seller thought we'd got it very cheap, as it had cost him $100,000 to build in 1985. We had it converted into a three-bedroom house with two bathrooms using a team of unqualified handy guys, Drew, Peter and Trevor, who between them could do anything. I used to race there every Friday and pay them. They did a terrific job, and I reckon it would have cost me another $35,000 for a registered building contractor to do the same work.
The Stratford one had its own challenges. All went okay – 80 piles driven, house backed in on truck. Then a council official casually asked my wife how they intended to get the house on to the piles.
She said she understood they were hoping to be able to cut the two central rows and back it in.
He replied: "You tell those guys that if they cut a single pile, we will require the house to be lifted off, the piles replaced, and it could all be at your expense. It's not how we do things in Stratford."
So, a few hundred extra block piles were delivered and, over several hours, used to build a ramp, Lego-style, for the house trailer. Central House Movers honoured the contract price and did not charge me extra for this, although the foreman wasn't too happy. I asked him how things were going, and he responded pointedly, "Nothing that a few more loads of blocks and a few thousand more dollars won't fix."
These two shifts both worked out okay in the end, and we got four reasonable rentals out of it. We had some pretty rough tenants at times, but after 10 years, we made a decent capital gain on both. In both instances, we also found a single garage/workshop for about $1000 and had it craned on to the site.
The Stratford job cost $45,000, comprising house purchase price, $17,000, moving, $19,000, and piling (piles $6700, driving $2680).
You may be wondering how we dealt with stormwater on this site where soakholes were not feasible. We were lucky: a major council stormwater main ran along one side of the property. I was able to connect five downpipes into a buried homemade plastic pipe network and feed that into a hole cut in the side of an access shaft. I burnt out two impact drills in the process.
I have been my own project manager on these ventures, done my own consent applications and site plans, and negotiated direct with all contractors, despite no previous experience in any of these areas. I have had very little difficulty dealing with council officers and building inspectors.
I have done relocatables only in Taranaki, but have worked under the rules of three different district councils in that region. And they are all different, and their inspectors have different attitudes.
Richard Woodd is a semi-retired journalist and editor in New Plymouth. He is immediate past president of the Taranaki Property Investors’ Association.
