What a country house costs in Colombia

The question nearly always arrives in the same shape: "what does a square metre of a house in the country cost?". And the honest answer starts with something uncomfortable: in country housing the square metre is the unit that shares the cost out worst, because the items that weigh most do not depend on the size of the house but on the property.

Getting electricity as far as the plot costs the same for a house of 150 metres as for one of 400. The borehole costs whatever it costs to drill until water appears. The access track costs whatever it measures. Dividing all of that by the square metres built produces a number that collapses the moment the area changes, and that is why two country budgets showing the same rate per square metre can be incomparable.

What the city already had, and here has to be built

On an urban plot you buy a property with a paved street in front of it, with the electricity network on the pole, with mains water and with a sewer. None of that is free: it is paid for in the price of the plot and in the connections. It simply already exists.

In the countryside it does not. Each of those four things is a project of its own, with its design, its budget, its programme and, in two cases, its environmental procedure.

The access track, and the track during the works

People budget the finished track and forget the construction track, which is another thing entirely. During the works, mixers, tipper trucks and loaded lorries come in that way, and a track that serves a pick-up will not serve for that. Keeping it passable through the rains is a running cost of the works, not an initial investment.

There is also a legal question that comes first and is worth settling before signing the purchase: where do you get in. If the access crosses somebody else’s land, you need a right of way created and recorded. A verbal arrangement with the neighbour is not an access.

The electricity

If the network operator’s line reaches the road and the property is close by, it is a supply connection. If not, the extension has to be built: poles, conductor, and often a transformer of your own. It is an electrical design that the network operator reviews and approves, not something bought at a builders’ merchant.

The water

With no acueducto veredal — the village-level water system, usually run by the community itself — the water comes from a source of your own: a borehole, a shallow hand-dug well, a surface intake or rainwater harvesting. None of the four is merely a piece of building work. Using water from a natural source requires a water concession granted by the corporación autónoma regional, the regional environmental authority, which is an administrative procedure with an application, a site visit and a formal decision.

And after the water comes drinking water, which is a separate item: storage tank, pumping, filtration and disinfection. A house that depends on a source of its own needs a system, not a hose.

The waste water

With no sewer, waste water is treated on the property and then disposed of. The discharge requires a permit from the corporación autónoma regional, and the treatment system is designed: it is not a generic "septic tank" but a treatment train sized for the number of occupants and for the ground.

The detail that pushes the cost up: the infiltration field depends on how that soil absorbs, and a clay soil or a high water table forces more expensive solutions. Once again the ground is deciding the budget before the architect does.

Haulage to site is not an item: it is a multiplier

This is the structural difference most people underestimate. In the city, transport is built into the price of material delivered to site and weighs little. In the countryside, transport is added to everything: to the concrete, the steel, the brick, the aggregate, the finishes and the waste that leaves.

And it has a hard threshold that decides the building system: how far a concrete mixer truck can get. If ready-mixed concrete cannot come in, it has to be mixed on site, which changes output, quality control, testing and programme. That single question can reorder the whole project.

• —The distance to the nearest concrete plant, in travelling time and not in kilometres.
• —The turning radius and the load capacity of the track, which decide what vehicle can get in.
• —Where material is stored on a property with no shed and no continuous watch.
• —What happens in the rainy season, which over much of the country is half the year.

The ground: slope, cuts and retaining

The plot with the best view is nearly always the steepest one, and the slope is paid for three times over: in earthworks, in retaining walls and in foundations.

The geotechnical survey stops being a procedural requirement and becomes the piece that decides the project. And on a hillside the building code asks for something more than an ordinary soil survey:

There are three things in there that cost money and are almost never in an initial budget. It applies as well when the house is at the top or the foot of the slope, not only on it. It obliges you to add a geologist to the team, alongside the geotechnical engineer. And it does not end in a diagnosis: it obliges you to design the stabilisation works, which then have to be built.

On the survey itself, two clarifications that save arguments. The obligation does not depend on size: definitive geotechnical surveys are compulsory for all urban and suburban buildings, of any use group — and country housing usually sits on suburban land. And the number of boreholes and their depth are not decided by whoever drills either: the code sets a minimum by category of the construction unit, which for a house of up to three storeys is three boreholes of at least six metres.

It is signed by a registered civil engineer holding a postgraduate qualification in geotechnics or more than five years of experience in the geotechnical design of foundations. It is a survey with legal responsibility attached, not a laboratory test.

A remote site costs differently

A site an hour and a half from the city is not run like an urban site, and that has a cost even though it appears under no construction heading.

The full list of what a construction budget leaves out — surveys, designs, permit charges, taxes, connections, bonds, contingencies — is in the twelve items everyone forgets when budgeting. In the countryside all of them still apply, and the five in this article are added on top.

What this article is not going to give you

There are no figures here, and the absence is deliberate. It is worth saying exactly why, item by item, because "there is no data" said in general sounds like an excuse:

How it gets pinned down before buying the plot

Almost all the overspend on a country house is decided on the day the purchase of the property is signed, not on the day the works are contracted. These six questions are answered beforehand, with a document and not with a word:

1. 1Where do I get in, and is that access legally created? If it crosses somebody else’s land, a recorded right of way.
2. 2How many metres away is the existing electricity network? Measured, not estimated.
3. 3Where is the water going to come from, and does that source have, or could it have, a concession?
4. 4Where does the waste water go, and is that disposal feasible in this ground?
5. 5What does the POT say about this property? The POT is the municipal land-use plan: class of land, category, uses and density. Before the deed.
6. 6Can a mixer truck get in? It is a logistics question that decides the building system and the programme.

The first four are cost. The fifth is what decides whether the project exists at all: what you may build and how many dwellings a rural property admits is in what you can build on rural land, and the full check before signing is in buying a lot: the twelve-point check.

The short answer

• —The house, per square metre built, does not cost radically differently from one in the city.
• —What does cost differently is everything else: track, power, water, sanitation, earthworks and haulage.
• —Those items depend on the property and not on the area, so a rate per square metre shares them out badly by construction.
• —Two of them — the water and the discharge — are environmental procedures with timescales of their own, not purchases.
• —And nearly all of them can be pinned down before signing the deed for the plot, which is while they can still be negotiated.

At Plano Base the budget for a country house does not start from the square metre: it starts from the property. Planning enquiry, access, service connections, water, discharge and soil survey first; concept design next; the figure last. In that order the figure arrives late, and that is why it holds.

The obligations cited are taken from the articles in force. Everything that goes without a figure goes without a figure on purpose: it is information about the property, and this article does not know yours.