While most new house list­ings have left many low- and mid­dle-in­come earn­ers de­spair­ing that their dream of home own­er­ship may be a far-fetched re­al­i­ty, a niche mar­ket has emerged which may have giv­en them new hope.

In the face of con­sis­tent list­ings with price ranges start­ing from $1 mil­lion, sev­er­al low-cost, non­tra­di­tion­al hous­ing op­tions have emerged in the past two years. This has giv­en many the op­tion to own a three-bed­room home for as lit­tle as 25 per cent of the cost of the av­er­age new home.

Tiny Spaces TT, Chef­pro Mega­s­tore, and Kence Con­tain­ers are some of the names that emerged, ad­ver­tis­ing con­tain­er and pre­fab homes for as lit­tle as $50,000.

In the case of Tiny Spaces, the com­pa­ny was cre­at­ed in di­rect re­sponse to the sit­u­a­tion in the hous­ing mar­ket.

“We recog­nised a grow­ing gap in the lo­cal hous­ing and com­mer­cial mar­ket — the need for af­ford­able, flex­i­ble, and quick­ly de­ploy­able spaces. Through our mar­ket re­search and in­ter­ac­tions with home­own­ers and small busi­ness own­ers, we saw that tra­di­tion­al con­struc­tion was be­com­ing in­creas­ing­ly cost­ly and time-con­sum­ing,” the Tiny Spaces team told the Busi­ness Guardian in an emailed re­sponse to queries.

Tiny Spaces T&T man­ag­er Re­nee Ng Fong ex­pand­ed on this fur­ther in an in­ter­view at the com­pa­ny’s Aranguez lo­ca­tion.

“We would have seen an op­por­tu­ni­ty where peo­ple who would have been in­ter­est­ed in, one, con­tain­ers, and, two, cheap­er or more cost-ef­fec­tive ways of get­ting hous­es. As we know, in Trinidad and To­ba­go, and I mean by ex­ten­sion the Caribbean, the cost of hous­ing could be some­thing that on­ly a per­cent­age of the ac­tu­al pub­lic is able to ob­tain.”

The de­ci­sion to de­vel­op the busi­ness was al­so par­tial­ly in­formed by the com­pa­ny’s pro­vi­sion of food trail­ers and kitchen con­tain­ers, which have grown in pop­u­lar­i­ty as food park pa­tron­age rose in the wake of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic.

Sales ex­ec­u­tive Nardesh Maraj said, “We want­ed to in­tro­duce an al­ter­na­tive that com­bines mod­ern de­sign, struc­tur­al dura­bil­i­ty, and af­ford­abil­i­ty with­out com­pro­mis­ing com­fort or aes­thet­ics. Our pre­fab so­lu­tions of­fer peo­ple the free­dom to own or ex­pand a space faster, whether it’s a starter home, Airbnb, café, of­fice or re­tail unit. Es­sen­tial­ly, Tiny­Spaces­TT was born out of a de­sire to make qual­i­ty spaces more ac­ces­si­ble, sus­tain­able, and adapt­able to the evolv­ing Caribbean lifestyle.”

How­ev­er, while this ap­proach to hous­ing is a bit re­moved from the pick­et-fence-man­sion idea most may have as­so­ci­at­ed with home own­er­ship, the com­pa­ny said pub­lic de­mand is grow­ing con­sis­tent­ly.

“The pub­lic re­sponse has been over­whelm­ing­ly pos­i­tive and con­tin­ues to grow. What be­gan as a niche con­cept has now evolved in­to a recog­nised so­lu­tion for both res­i­den­tial and com­mer­cial spaces. You can find our con­tain­er units across sev­er­al lo­cal and re­gion­al de­vel­op­ments,’ said Maraj. “In Trinidad, for in­stance, our kitchen con­tain­ers are fea­tured at the new Xtra Foods com­pound in Aranguez and al­so at the Aranguez Food Park. Re­gion­al­ly, our Tiny­Spaces units have al­so been de­ployed in Guyana, Grena­da and as far as the British Vir­gin Is­lands. The in­creas­ing vis­i­bil­i­ty of our projects has re­al­ly helped to build aware­ness and con­fi­dence in this new way of liv­ing and do­ing busi­ness.”

How­ev­er, that does not mean there has been some con­cern that these op­tions are not the tra­di­tion­al build.

“At first, there’s nat­u­ral­ly some cu­rios­i­ty and hes­i­ta­tion be­cause the con­cept is new to many peo­ple. But once they see the qual­i­ty and strength of our builds, that scep­ti­cism quick­ly fades. These units are based on proven tech­nol­o­gy that has been suc­cess­ful­ly im­ple­ment­ed around the world. For ex­am­ple, sim­i­lar mod­u­lar sys­tems were used in Chi­na to de­ploy en­tire field hos­pi­tals dur­ing COVID-19 in just a mat­ter of days,” said Maraj.

Ng Fong al­so not­ed that con­fi­dence has grown to the point that some cus­tomers are us­ing the pre-fab and con­tain­er units as meth­ods to ex­pand their cur­rent struc­tures, as clients have ap­pre­ci­at­ed the ver­sa­til­i­ty of the struc­tures.

“Def­i­nite­ly, we would have had a mul­ti­tude of cus­tomers through just this week, ac­tu­al­ly look­ing at tak­ing units and ac­tu­al­ly cre­at­ing larg­er spaces. We’ve had cus­tomers in the past who have cre­at­ed a whole en­tire build­ing com­plex with con­tain­ers,” she said.

How­ev­er, for those who are still seek­ing a low-cost op­tion that is still based on tra­di­tion­al con­struc­tion meth­ods, Hunter Stern Con­struc­tion is hop­ing to oc­cu­py that space with Hunter Stern Home­S­tart Pro­gramme which of­fers starter home op­tions rang­ing from $190,000 to $300,000.

“This is from foun­da­tion to fin­ish. This in­cludes your light fix­tures, your bath­room fix­tures, your wa­ter heater. It in­cludes your sep­tic tank and soak-away pits. You can live in that home when we’re done with it, and this is a tra­di­tion­al­ly built home,” said Olivia Gar­cia of Hunter Stern, who ex­plained that the var­i­ous con­tain­er homes of­ten re­quired a foun­da­tion to be laid down be­fore they can be prop­er­ly in­stalled.

“We de­signed some homes that are mod­ern-look­ing. They’re beau­ti­ful and they have good qual­i­ty. It’s a stan­dard, tra­di­tion­al con­crete home that Trinida­di­ans are used to. These are the homes that have served the test of time in Trinidad. A lot of our con­crete homes, they stand up. We’ve faced bad weath­er, we’ve faced earth­quakes, we’ve dealt with sev­er­al things,” Gar­cia ex­plained, adding that the com­pa­ny recog­nised the most cost-ef­fec­tive means to con­struct homes through mar­ket as­sess­ment and con­sul­ta­tion with cus­tomers. She not­ed that many clients of­ten find them­selves in­cur­ring ex­tra costs due to their lack of knowl­edge of the process.

“Chef Pro homes, they’re do­ing a home for $299,000, but as I said, you’ll still have to build a foun­da­tion for that. We ac­tu­al­ly do the en­tire thing for $300,000, in­clud­ing your sep­tic cir­cle weight, and we do your foun­da­tion as well. And the is­sue is, from what we un­der­stand, it’s a mat­ter of peo­ple just sim­ply, one, don’t know, and two, they’re afraid to deal with spe­cif­ic things in this mar­ket and in the in­dus­try,” said Gar­cia.

The Busi­ness Guardian did reach out to Chef Pro Mega­s­tore for this piece, but they did not is­sue a re­sponse to our ques­tions up to the time of pub­li­ca­tion.