Ireland approved a 45 m² back-garden planning exemption in April 2026. Enquiries to Irish modular providers spiked 400% within weeks. Nobody had built a comparison site for the buyers.
On 21 April 2026 the Cabinet approved a planning-permission exemption for back-garden modular homes up to 45 m². The exemption is paired with €14,000 of tax-free annual rental income under a licence-rather-than-tenancy structure (the "rent-a-room" precedent applied to a separate dwelling). Building regulations still apply, but the planning trip-wire is gone.
The Indo reported a 400% spike in enquiries at one Irish modular provider in the days after the announcement. That demand is real, but the Irish supply side is fragmented — about a dozen domestic providers, no comparison engine, no aggregator, and almost no published prices. Most are quote-on-request.
Meanwhile, more than fifty Baltic prefab manufacturers (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) build the same product type at 30–40% lower prices. Brand awareness in Ireland is essentially zero.
We aggregate every modular and tiny home option an Irish buyer can realistically buy — Irish, Baltic, Polish, Romanian, Bulgarian, British, beyond — into one comparison engine. We publish prices where they exist, flag them as "quote on request" where they don't, and badge each provider with a clear delivery-to-Ireland confidence level: confirmed, EU-wide claim, unclear, or explicitly excluded.
We don't sell houses. We're not a manufacturer, importer, or builder. We're an editorial comparison site funded by featured listings, lead-gen referral fees, and (in Phase 2) a brokerage commission on Baltic-sourced sales we facilitate end-to-end.
Transparency matters more in this category than in most. The buyer is making a six-figure decision on a long-lead, hard-to-return product. They deserve to know how the comparison site they're using is paid.
| Stream | What it is | How it might bias us |
|---|---|---|
| Featured listings | Providers can pay €100–€500/month for top placement and a "verified" badge. | Featured providers appear higher in search results. Their data is the same as everyone else's; the badge is paid promotion. |
| Lead-gen fees | €50–€150 per qualified enquiry routed to a provider. | We're paid when you enquire. We're not paid when you buy. Our incentive is to send well-matched leads, not to oversell. |
| Brokerage commission (Phase 2) | 5% of closed sale price on Baltic-sourced deals where we project-manage delivery and setup. | This is the strongest bias. We disclose every brokered deal as such; buyers can always go direct to the manufacturer instead. |
| Sponsored content | Planning consultants, finance providers, partner trades. | Sponsored pieces are labelled. Editorial analysis isn't paid for. |
We don't take referral fees from individual delivery, planning, or finance providers without disclosing the relationship. The "honest broker" position is what makes the site useful — selling it for an extra few hundred euros a month would burn the whole asset.
The site exists because the operator is Baltic-resident and has direct first-hand experience of the Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian prefab market. The 52 Baltic providers in our seed database aren't a Google scrape — they're a working list maintained by someone who can pick up the phone in the right time zone, in the right language, and ask the questions an Irish buyer actually wants answered (real lead times, real Ireland delivery costs, real warranty terms, real after-sales support).
That's the moat. There are plenty of comparison sites that could be built with public data alone. The ones that are useful are built by someone with operational ground truth.
Buyer enquiry: hello@ourhouse.ie
Provider partnership: partners@ourhouse.ie
Press: press@ourhouse.ie
Twenty-one verified Ireland-delivery providers, prices from €15,635, sizes 25–60 m².
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