December 27, 2018

Factory-made homes grow more popular as cities face housing crunch

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The cost of building a home in the U.S. is rising as many cities face a construction labor shortage. In the hopes of shrinking the construction timeline, some home builders are turning to prefabricated units. Modular construction, as its known, is a small but growing segment of the market for single-family homes, apartment buildings and even hotels.

“The thing that needs to be thought about is the very tight metro markets can cause some logistics issues,” says John Erb, director of construction at Champion Commercial Structures, a modular construction company based in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. “Those 70-foot-long modules may not be able to be that big, but from a speed perspective, it’s absolutely a way to consider.”

In an urban setting, modular construction can cut a normal construction timeline down 25 to 30 percent, according to Erb. In a suburban area, it can knock the time frame down even more, by close to 45 percent.

And although the prefabricated units are quick to make, that doesn’t necessarily mean they are cheap in quality, Erb tells Here & Now’s Peter O’Dowd.

“It is what the perception has been for years,” Erb says. “But any person that comes and walks one of our projects walks away with a whole different mindset.”

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