There is scaffolding on Verena and Christian Aigner's double garage.

The facade has not yet been painted, although the couple and their two children have been living here on the Sattlerberg on the outskirts of Ortenburg in Lower Bavaria for a good two years.

"The slope of the property posed problems when planning the garage," says Christian Aigner.

There were errors in the permitting process, and so the construction is still unfinished.

Henning Peitsmeier

Business correspondent in Munich.

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Nevertheless, the 41-year-old client makes an all-round satisfied impression.

Wife Verena has her two-year-old daughter Marlene in her arms and says that everything else went smoothly.

Because the pretty house was finished on time, and the young mother is happy that they decided on a prefabricated house made of wood.

"Wood is warmer, and because the walls are thinner, we have 195 square meters of living space instead of 160 square meters with stone walls." More importantly, the "Mediterranean town villa" type house remained priced exactly in line with what it was, at a total of 800,000 euros including the plot previously promised by the municipality and also by the prefabricated house supplier Sonnleitner.

"Plate materials enormously expensive"

Today the Aigner family knows that Sonnleitner adds 15 to 20 percent to their houses.

"Whether I take out a loan of 500,000 euros or more than 600,000 euros, that's a different question," calculates insurance agent Aigner, who heads the local Allianz agency.

There is a simple reason for the price increases: "Panel materials such as spruce plywood have become enormously expensive," says Gotthard Sonnleitner, head of the prefabricated construction company of the same name.

The sawn timber alone, which the large sawmills are now also selling in China and the USA, now costs 700 euros per cubic meter.

Two years ago, when the Aigners got their dream house from Sonnleitner, the price per cubic meter was 200 euros.

In the end, it is the builders who bear the consequences.

And yet the demand for prefabricated houses is enormous.

"Since the financial crisis of 2010, things have been steadily improving," says the 55-year-old entrepreneur, who sometimes finds the long-lasting upswing a little scary, as he admits.

Sonnleitner has been building wooden houses for five decades,

Solid wood is stacked up on the extensive site, Sonnleitner has set up warehouses in order to remain able to deliver. In the halls, the 40 employees are working on the stop, outside the trucks are waiting to drive the finished house walls to the construction site: seven heavy trucks are needed for a house in industrial prefabrication. 80 to 100 houses are built here in Lower Bavaria, 20 minutes by car from Passau, every year. The medium-sized company has a turnover of around 25 million euros with a total of 125 employees. The signs point to expansion. Up to 4 million euros, maybe more, should be invested in the expansion of production by next year at the latest, says CFO Klaus Müller. A new, fourth factory hall is planned,to be able to complete more than 120 houses a year on the one hand and to establish modular construction on the other. "Today we drive walls to the construction site, in the future it will be entire rooms," says Müller.

The prefab industry is booming, no question about it.

According to the Federal Association of German Prefabricated Buildings (BDF), around 19,000 such new buildings were approved five years ago, and last year there were already 24,500.

Almost every fourth single or two-family house is now built with prefabricated parts.

While wood has become more expensive in prefabricated houses, it is the energy-intensive building materials such as steel and cement in solid houses.

The Ifo Institute has determined that around 36 percent of building construction companies complain about material shortages, in civil engineering it was almost 28 percent.

Residential construction is the hardest hit, with 40 percent of companies reporting that their construction activities are being hampered by delivery problems.