Modular Home construction increased by almost 48% between 1992 and 2002 – An obvious question is why ? What events led to this explosive growth in popularity ?

This is a series of posts designed to explore the factors influencing the rapid growth of the Modular Home Industry today.

The housing market is an extremely complex and difficult to observe ecosystem and whenever significant change occurs, as in this case of rapid growth in the construction of  modular homes during this period, it is always because many factors converged in a complex series of relationships changing and influencing the “incumbent market”. ie there is never a “simple answer” to change like we are seeing in the market – no single event is ever totally responsible.

It does seem however rather fortuitously for the modular home industry that many factors influencing the housing market are currently point in a direction that favor its acceptance and continued growth.  Here are a few of the factors that are positively influencing the Industry:

1, Speed of Construction

It seems that society is becoming increasingly focused on speed, getting as much done in the shortest time possible, and a natural extension of this conversation is the efficient use of ones time.

As one would expect this obsession has carried across to the construction business after all time is money here too right and the faster a project can be finished and handed over the better for everyone involved, the owners and the builders.

Speed of construction is one area where modular homes have a huge advantage over traditional stick built homes. A Californian experiment pitted two home construction projects against each other, both similar designs one was to be stick built and the other as a modular home.

The modular home took 4 months to construct compared to 14 months for the traditional stick built home.

Of course this the time taken for the actual construction phase when we look at the total project time which includes design, engineering, and approval it took 10 months for the modular home and 21 months for the traditionally built home.

These types of performance figures seem to be supported by other reports and anecdotal evidence drawn from Industry websites supporting the claims of efficiency with which one can build using the modular home technique.

It is important to factor in the effect that this improvement in construction time has on the owners of the house in terms of the money saved with regard to finding temporaryt accomdation during the construction process.

Next post – Minimal use of Skilled Resources