OSE Freenhouse Programs

• Volunteer with OSE. Your hours count towards us building a house for you for free. You pay for materials. We build a house for you once you reach 800-3000 hours of volunteer time. Size and finish of house that we build for you depends on your hours. Expect 800 hours for a shell starter home ready for occupancy, which you move into and do finish detail on your own schedule. We guarantee access to optimized build techniques via our Builder Crash Course. 1600 hours gets you a finished starter home. And up from there in size and feature, but quality remains high from the very start. We are not talking about poorly built mobile homes - but high quality expandable eco-homes that grow with you as your needs grow.
• Get the app, and start doing your hours
• If you volunteer 8 hours per week - we will build a starter home for you for free in just 2 years.
• Start today.
• Requirements - take Builder Crash Course once to qualify. Pay admission, or do work exchange to participate for free.

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Introducing Treehouse. We build a house for you for free. You just pay for materials. How about as little as $25k for an expandable starter home - vs saddling on a $400k mortgage? Start logging hours with us today. To begin, attend our Builder crash course - which you can even do for free if you volunteer with us

Think of it as a skill exchange. If you are inexperienced and building your house, you can work with us as we rlyeach you. You redeem your effort by having us build a house for you. You save countless hours by benefitting from years of our build optimization work.

Or if you are not building a house and have no skills - volunteer with us and start picking up skills. In this case, you will contribute to us, and we halp you by building your home for free - you pay only foraterials.

Facts and Figures

• 50% real cost increase with mortgage [1]
• 25% land, 25% labor, 25% materials, 25% profit, realtor, legal [2]
• Materials are 20-30% of house cost [3]
• Materials are 40-50% of build. Not true. Typical sub markup is 100%.
• Sub markup is 100-140% [4] Early in thread. Say 120% +25% for GC. On average 150% markup. In case of 140% and 30% for fixed vs cost Plus - 187% markup. But actual cost - from 100 to 280 to 370 - almost 4x. With 120% you are at 240, and 25% GC you are at 300k. 3x materials. Thus, materials are really 1/3 build cost after GC. Verified. In high cases, closer to 4x.
• Therefore, the more realistic version of 25% labor 25% materials is 17% materials and 34% labor.
• Thus, overall materials cost is only 1/6 of house cost!
• If you add mortgage, then materials are only 17% of 150% - or about 11% of the real house cost when mortgage is involved. This is absolutely right - $60k materials, $600k real house cost.