It depends how nice you want your house to look - IMO UV mapping is a necessary evil, to get the best results from your work.
The other side of the coin though is actual texture usage, so models can use a single, repeated texture, like brick for instance. When this is the case, it's best to UV map anyway, quite easy really, but you don't concern yourself with squishing everything into the texture. I would usually start with a box map, then move all the parts around so they line up nicely. Then I scale the UV map so a brick texture would be repeated over the whole model. This technique is quite nice when you lightmap, as you can get away with a lot when that's the case - but the most important thing is you have a texture repeated, and because of that the actual resolution can be much better.
To get further away from time consuming modelling, I would suggest making a really nice level editor, so then you might have a plain brick building, but then add detail with a level editor. This means your plain brick building can be re-used, and different buildings take little time to put together. But then you add in detail, like windows and doors, as seperate objects. This is most convenient with FPS games as you can then detect different materials and stuff for physics or even just Sparky's collision plugin. So you could have different decals for brick, wood, metal, glass - all quite easily with that technique. By breaking things down to doors, windows, single material objects really, well UV mapping becomes a whole lot easier and quicker.
So I'd say you can take shortcuts, but you have to be prepared to spend time on an editor, which in the long run is no bad thing at all.
