December 28, 2018

How to bring homebuilding into the 21st century

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Few processes are as antiquated as that of building a house. While every other field has benefited from new technologies, building a single-family house is still a clumsy process affected by far-off manufacturers, supply deliveries, unreliable labor, the weather, the schedules of subcontractors and the varying whims of the client. Almost any unforeseen event can slow things to a halt, costing the builder and the homeowner lots and lots of time and money.

Builders have sought to streamline the process in varying ways. In southwestern New Hampshire, Bensonwood touts a better way to build, constructing timber-framed houses with high-tech machinery, then assembling them on site. And while builders in Utah and California are also finding ways to standardize the process, many in the East and the South are still stuck in the early 20th century.

“Until now, residential home construction has been a matter of reinventing the wheel each time,” says Aaron Polhemus, a principal of Polhemus Savery DaSilva of East Harwich, Massachusetts. The Cape Cod design-build firm founded by his father, Peter Polhemus, in 1996, was one of the first fully integrated design and construction firms in the area.

“Construction has been one of the most resistant sectors to technology,” Aaron Polhemus says. “A system like that is broken – there is no accountability and no one knows where they stand.”

This won’t do for the homebuilder of today, he says.

“Our clients expect a project to be managed so that they can be connected,” he says. “It is a very different world from even five years ago.”