I have been reporting on all things modular for over a decade and have seen reporters write stories confusing manufactured homes with modular homes, Realtors stating that modular homes are not real homes and just about every other type of untruth about modular you can think of but when I read this excerpt from an article on Engineering.com I said to myself, “Now here is a guy that really understands the future of modular.”
What Gary Wyatt from Autodesk said about the people on the production line at modular home factories is so true. I have been in the construction industry for over 30 years and compared to the labor on site built homes, the labor found in a modular factory is much superior. Many production line people are long term employees having been on the job for decades while their equivalent in the field tend to view pounding nails in the heat, rain and cold as a laborer a temporary job at best.
Here is his excerpt from Engineering.com:
Gary Wyatt, Autodesk director of building design, cited several factors that have made modular more popular. The primary one is the skilled labor shortage that has hit construction markets worldwide in the past few years, making it difficult for contractors to hire enough workers.
According to Wyatt, modular home construction means that more of the skilled work is done at the beginning of the building process, allowing designers to leave detailed instructions on how the modules should be put together.
“By using offsite fabrication processes, you can have much lower-skilled people be able to actually construct these buildings,” he said. “It’s almost like an Ikea or Lego-like approach where the designer can specify what the building is going to look like and how it should be put together.”
His equating the building process to that of Ikea or Lego is completely understandable. By producing the volumetric module in a factory using skilled and trained people and then having it shipped to the jobsite where lower skilled labor can assemble it on the jobsite, although not something new, means that the labor shortage normally found in an entire site built home or hotel project can be shifted to the end of the project.
Mr Wyatt, you’ve said more in a shorter amount of words about the value and promise of modular than anyone I know. Thank you!
