Tired of high costs, some Americans are importing homes straight from China

By Ramishah Maruf, CNN

New York (CNN) — Gennadiy Tsygan knows how expensive it is to build a home in the United States. That’s why he imported almost everything for his dream house from China.

Most of his home fixtures were imported directly from over two dozen factories, and Tsygan — an engineer in Baltimore — flew halfway around the world in 2024 to choose some of those products.

His home is cozy but industrial, standing out in a sea of Baltimore’s colonials and ranches. It’s made out of gray fiber cement but has welcoming floor-to-ceiling windows and an open kitchen. Tsygan is proud of even the smallest features, such as doors with a magnetic lock to achieve a silent click and European-style windows. The home is on track for LEED certification, he adds.

“Building home is a project of a lifetime, and I treat it as an adventure and try to have fun with it,” Tsygan said. “That’s how I came to trying to import some building materials from China.”

With the high cost of home construction, more Americans are becoming curious about working with Chinese suppliers on their renovations. The price of home construction materials in the United States increased by 3% from last year, according to the National Association of Home Builders. And since 27% of those materials came from China in 2023, some US homebuilders are thinking of skipping the middleman like Home Depot and local contractors.

The China renovation hack is also all over American homeowners’ social media feeds. A woman who said she allegedly turned down a $50,000 cabinet quote locally to import from China got more than 165,000 likes, and others share vendor lists. Chinese manufacturers also advertise directly to social media users, saying they can deliver cabinets, tiles and any other materials to your front door.

The curiosity is reminiscent of manufacturers encouraging Americans to buy designer handbags directly from China or the recent trend of “Chinamaxxing.”

But it isn’t for the faint of heart: The initial smaller price tag comes with its own set of issues, such as fluctuating tariffs that can go sky high, specialized labor costs, language barriers and delivery delays.

Importing from China paid off for Tsygan, who estimated that he saved up to $100,000 with this method. But he emphasized the process is far from “cheap,” saying he paid an average of $13,000 for shipping per container of custom goods from China.

‘Outrageous’ materials costs

Constructing a home comes with a hefty price tag in the United States.

Metal molding and trim is up 45% year-over-year, upping the price of windows, Robert Dietz, NAHB’s chief economist, told CNN. Lumber prices have risen 8% over the last year, and aluminum has gone up “due to trade and tariff policy.”

“Material prices are definitely getting a little outrageous,” Will Mueller, Tsygan’s builder from IronGate Builders, told CNN. Materials can make up two-thirds of the total cost of a custom home, Mueller said, with the rest primarily being labor.

Tsygan said the brown siding on his home was sold at a 150% markup on Amazon and “mostly imported from China anyways.” The floor-to-ceiling windows were unaffordable domestically, and the sound-proof, magnetic-locked doors were almost four times more expensive in the United States, according to local websites.

Importing is an appealing trade-off for many consumers, and sellers based in China know this. Many aspirational homeowners see Chinese sourcing agents showing off luxury bathroom models and cabinets in English on their algorithms.

“Within one day you can buy all the building materials for your new house here” for less than $10,000, one sourcing agent based in China claimed on TikTok. Another Chinese manufacturer with almost 30,000 TikTok followers boasted the company “can copy the whole house from a floorplan for up to half the cost.”

Many of these sellers are based in Foshan, a Chinese city known for its home decoration and building material industry and one that “likely has lots of stuff that you can buy from Home Depot and Amazon,” Hao Dong, a professor in operations and project management at the University of Southampton, told CNN. It’s even more important for Chinese factory owners to seek new markets with a slowing domestic real estate business market, he added.

Zhao Ke, a sourcing agent who goes by Cody Sourcing on social media, told CNN he gets around 300 homebuilding customers a month. Between five to 10 will visit China to tour showrooms and order products, he said.

“Especially in recent years, more and more even with the tariff war, people are still buying from (Chinese manufacturers),” he told CNN.

A complex process

Tsygan did not import his entire home ready-made, as some TikToks from manufacturers suggest. The initial process was a lot of “blind navigation,” he said.

He searched for windows on Alibaba, for example, as well as contacts with Chinese manufacturers that were certified in the US. The research culminated in a visit to China in 2024.

Then he encountered obstacles stateside. Right off the bat, he needed to find a builder that would be willing to take on designs unfamiliar to the American market.

Though Mueller, Tsygan’s builder, said he was “pleasantly surprised” by the quality of the materials, there can be other logistical headaches. For example, craftsmen need to translate instructions in Mandarin and adjust any differences in measurements. People looking to follow in Tsygan’s footsteps need other pricey equipment like a telehandler as well.

“It’s a first for us, and we actually tried to talk him away from it. But it’s his money and his house,” Mueller said, referring to Tsygan’s decision to import from China.

Importing opens the door to a string of potential issues. First, materials could be subject to the fluctuating tariffs on China, which reached 145% at one point last year.

There’s also the longer wait time. Tsygan’s home has been in the works since October 2024. Returns and fixes take months, and “on orders of this scale, something will be wrong regardless,” Tsygan said.

For Tsygan, he said the main benefit is access to features that were unavailable in the United States, or just plain expensive — though he added that it’s hard to compare American and Chinese offerings.

It’s been a “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunity, he said, but one that is “complex and riddled with risks.”

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