There is a great market in the UK for prefabbed Canadian wood frame houses with concrete basements I would have thought. There are companies here in NB that do this pre-fab construction...quick to assemble on site and warm in the winter and better quality control. Needs a selling job.
Rupert. The selling job needs to start with the local councils and also with the mortgage providers...and thirdly I think with the builders.
Basements would cost more and require the councils to insist that sewers are deeper... nobody is going to have pumped toilets and remember they still build houses on flood plains just to make basements more expensive. Nothing that can't be done and is done here all the time but it would be new there.
Wood framed houses as in North America. Mortgages companies probably don't know how to value them and fire insurance companies don't know how to insure them. AND find a builder, especially the big sub division builders who know how to build them! AND find people who will buy them.
I think that part of the problem is that people in Europe in general have been building houses out of mud ( aka bricks and concrete) and stone for thousands of years but the first Europeans to come to NA brought few masons and few quarrymen with them and of course there was/is and enormous amount of cheap wood that had to be cut down anyway to clear the land for farms.
