Offsite home construction: why it may work
Tell the busy managers of just about any commercially minded company that you can give them an edge, you’ll find their schedules are suddenly open. Who doesn’t want to improve efficiency, planning and profit? For those in the home construction game, sticking with business as usual carries considerable risks.
So what’s a canny construction industry to do? Let’s start with the fun stuff: the latest in construction technology. The B1M’s 2018 trends video offers a digestible overview of what’s moving from gimmick to practical application:
- augmented reality: clever visual techniques allow clients to virtually step inside spaces before buying or developing them.
- robotics: it can feel like a no-brainer to let the machinery carry out on-site tasks instead, producing building materials with 3D printers while generally improving efficiency and safety standards.
- autonomous vehicles: improve build times and address the skilled-labour shortage that plagues construction companies.
- offsite construction: manufacturing sections or whole buildings in a purpose-built factory elsewhere before transferring them to site can be a game changer.
While the transformative nature of these technologies is exciting, in the here and now it is the latter, offsite construction, with the potential for immediate impact on the country’s housing woes.
The UK housing crisis
The Conservative government has pledged to fix our broken housing market, in part by making new-home construction a priority. The 2017 Budget set out a plan to build three hundred thousand homes every year, but it’s a target more easily set than attained. Much of the focus is on affordable housing for those on low incomes, and for construction firms willing to rise to the challenge this means building living spaces in an efficient and cost-effective way without forgoing a reasonable profit.
Enter offsite construction
Taking almost the entire build process offsite, into the customised environs of a purpose-built factory, translates into faster build times, more control, and fewer errors – all of which lowers costs, of course. Goodbye bad-weather days and long lead times; hello parallel stages: instead of waiting for step 1 to finish before step 2 can start, the ground at site is prepared for installation at the same time the offsite home build is happening. Could you do with cutting project times in half? We thought so.
The evidence we have to date points to offsite home development as faster, cheaper, and more energy-efficient. A policy statement from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers affirms its role in fixing the housing supply market: ‘Construction technologies have advanced greatly in recent years and can offer shorter build times, better quality, better energy efficiency, less waste, and lower costs for buyers.’
Its impact delayed
With the benefits apparently this clear, why isn’t everyone doing it? In short, there are barriers. Though offsite construction may sidestep the problem of skill shortages somewhat, it doesn’t eliminate it. And then there is the issue of scale: achieving lower construction costs per unit requires big spaces and access to plenty of up-front financing, neither of which are necessarily easy to come by.
