Natalie Burrows knew her family could never find their dream home on the open market because they were looking for the impossible: a three-bedroom, two-bathroom property on a specific scenic road that they love by Scotland’s Loch Tay. Such a house is rarely listed for sale – and even if it were, it would be well out of their budget. Yet she has found a surprising way to beat the housing crisis and make her dream happen.
From 450 miles away in Bedfordshire, where Burrows lives in barracks housing with her military husband and 16-year-old stepson, she is now overseeing the building of a new flat-pack modular home on that very road. She is one of the few UK families to embrace the trend of modular housing, which has long been popular in Scandinavia and is now taking the US by storm in response to the rising cost of buying a home.
“We were house-hunting for three years and during that time only four properties that we were happy with came up,” Burrows, a nutritionist, says. “My husband didn’t want to take on a big [expensive] renovation. Then we found a piece of land on this road. We knew it was time to move and the right land, in the right location, and all the numbers started making sense.”
In America it’s possible to buy a prefabricated modular home on Amazon, complete with kitchen and bathroom, for as little as $8,000 (£6,100). The low price of land in the US makes it a cheap option for families struggling to buy a regular home through an estate agent. Here in the UK, it’s less straightforward but, with the right planning and preparation, it can be done.
Self-building in the UK is a long and complex process. Land costs vary hugely between areas, each council has a different planning system to navigate, and support for independent home builders is limited. Project costs also fluctuate depending on the type of building, the vision of your architect, and the availability of developers. In some areas the cost of buying land and building is far more than the final home would be valued at to sell, which can make the project financially risky – and that’s before you get into insurance costs and contingency funds.
As the couple began to look into self-building, Burrows became “overwhelmed” at the amount of decisions that would have to be made to build a new traditional brick home from scratch. It all seemed too complicated until the couple discovered prefab modular housing, which was more expensive than across the Atlantic, but cheaper than other options. The modular property they chose is sold at around £285,000, and with the land and further installation costs the final home is set to cost about £550,000 in total.
The property itself costs £285,000 but with the land and installation the total will come to about £550,000 (Photo: Danwood)The family put an offer on the land and it was accepted. They chose to work with Danish modular housing company Danwood, which makes a few hundred homes a year in the UK and offers prefabricated properties that come with everything except the kitchen ready to install.
“A year later we’ve got planning and we’ve got builders on site. You buy the home ‘turnkey’ [completely finished and ready to live in], so you get to keep control of the costs,” Natalie says. “It comes with everything: carpet, paint on the walls, air source heat pump, everything except the kitchen.” The home takes only two days to put in the ground, but full completion with fixtures and fittings usually takes around 14 weeks.
The family were particularly attracted by the lower environmental cost of building their own home, and chose a modular property which meets Passivhaus standards, meaning it is highly insulated with low energy costs. Burrows says it felt important that their small development was part of a positive change. “A bit like how we’re moving away from oil and gas to ground source heat pumps, we’ve got to start moving into different styles of building,” she explains.
There have been some snags along the way – and the project isn’t finished yet. It took only two months for the couple to get planning permission for the land, but this had to be in place before their mortgage lender would agree to its purchase. That meant convincing the seller that they should put down a conditional deposit and press ahead to obtain permission at their own risk before they owned the land, a gamble that paid off.
After house-hunting for three years with no luck, Burrows turned to modular housingFinding a lender in the first place was a challenge once they admitted they were looking to build a modular home. “Finding a broker isn’t easy. The journey to getting a mortgage if you’re doing what we’re doing isn’t easy. We had eight lenders available at first, and lost five of them.” In fact, the couple were told they could borrow £180,000 more if they had opted to buy a traditional home on the existing property market – a huge difference.
These snags could explain why modular housing is still in its infancy in the UK, still rarely chosen by self-builders. There are a number of councils piloting schemes, but widespread use is being held back, particularly by planning constraints. According to Make UK Modular, the trade body for producers of these flat-pack homes, only 3,300 modular homes were built in the UK in 2022 and most of these were by larger developers such as housing associations.
Peter Barr, director of Sipco, a modular design and manufacture company, says there is still a perception problem in the UK which is holding people back: “Some people hear ‘modular’ or ‘prefab’ and think of temporary or low-end, But the materials, the engineering, the finishes and the technology around it have all come a long way. You wouldn’t necessarily know a [modular] home from a traditional one unless you were told. Right now, we’re spending as much time explaining what they are as we are actually building with them.”
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According to Robin Edwards, a buying agent for Curetons Property Finders, public perception is finally shifting. “Younger buyers and renters, priced out of traditional homes, are more open to alternative options,” he says. But he warns that the Government will need to do more if these off-the-peg homes are to make a dent in the UK housing crisis. “Without significant policy support, clearer planning guidance and mainstream financial products for buyers of such homes, modular housing will remain a niche solution,” he says.
The one thing Burrows wishes she’d understood at the outset? How tricky it would be to get information at each stage. For example, much of their mortgage application has had to be made on the basis of best guesses around final costs. “It felt like there was a gatekeeper at each turn,” she says, “I wish someone would make it easier. It could easily put people off”.
Burrows and her husband relied heavily on YouTube content made by other modular builders to work out all the small but crucial issues they might have forgotten. “Nobody shares with you that you’ll need a structural warranty, an engineer, the insurance, the skips and lock ups. Things like that can catch you out and take the project from under your feet,” she says. “There isn’t readily available information about what the project looks like from start to finish.”
Now her modular property is finally under development, Burrows is excited to finally see her Scottish dream home brought to life. The couple expect the project to be completed next summer and are preparing to move in September 2026. “We wouldn’t do a bricks and mortar [self-build] because I probably would have a breakdown and a heart attack,” she says. “this made it feel accessible.”
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