The Woodlands at Harvest Hill, constructed by Trumbull-Nelson, used floor and wall panels preassembled in Andover and trucked to the construction site in Lebanon. Courtesy Photo.
Since millions of people around the world saw the time-lapse video of a 15-story hotel in Shanghai being built in 2010 from prefabricated materials in 48 hours, the prefab materials industry has had a seismic image shift.
“For a long time, the entire industry poo-pooed the idea of industrialized buildings ... When they were ugly boxes, essentially the whole industry rejected them,” says Ian Howell, CEO, of Newforma, a software development company in Manchester focused on the AEC (Architectural, Engineering and Construction) market.
The fact is a growing number of contractors are now using prefabrication and modular construction. One reason is a global workforce shortage in the construction industry.Other reasons include advances in design technology and better quality products.
Using prefabricated components, panelized assemblies and full modular units can save time, circumvent weather issues and result in consistent quality, says Jim Lynch, vice president of the BIM Product Group for the AEC Division at Autodesk in Manchester, which creates 3D design and engineering software. “I think what’s really driving off-site planning is increased predictability, greater safety and it being more cost effective,” he says. “Another reason it’s appealing to the global construction industry is because of the workforce shortage.”
As more contractors recognize these benefits, it means more business for those in the prefab industry, including Atlantic Prefab in Nashua. Mark Beroney, general manager and senior designer at Atlantic Prefab, has been in the prefab business for 20 years and says the increased demand for prefab “has kind of popped up overnight in the past two years.”
The labor shortage, in conjunction with the increased availability of 3D modeling, has opened new sources of revenue, some from unlikely customers. “With the latest boom, we’ve even seen drywall and framing contractors, who usually want to keep work to themselves, coming to us,” he says. “They’re getting work, but they’re not able to put crews onsite fast enough. They are hiring us to do the wall panels and they’ll install them. That allows them to take these jobs, instead of turning them away.”
Beroney says this has meant a 100 percent growth in business in the past year. “Speaking from our own experience, we have had quite a bit of growth,” he says. “We are doing double the business this year that we did last year.” The company currently has 25 employees and is working increasingly with subcontractors. Still, he has not seen increased local competition.
According to Tom Hardiman, executive director of the Modular Building Institute (MBI), the international trade association for the commercial modular market, there are six main growth markets: education, health care, hospitality and retail, multifamily, administrative space, and institutional facilities like prisons and police stations.
“Currently modular construction makes up about 3 percent of new commercial construction in North America, but it’s growing all the time as developers realize the benefits and advantages,” Hardiman says. “There is a steady growth in both the residential and commercial modular industries. Single-family residential markets are strongest in the northeast United States.”
In 2014, $18.5 billion in new construction was put in place in the Northeast, according to Construction Market Data Group (CMD), which forecasts a 6 percent growth overall in the region in the next five years and 27 percent in the multifamily market. “MBI members are well-positioned to take advantage of this growth opportunity in the Northeast with several manufacturers active in the multifamily market,” MBI states in its 2015 annual report. The Permanent Modular Construction Annual Report cites NH as number one in the United States when projecting expansion in construction.
Why Prefab?
Manufacturers have long procured some manufactured parts from offsite vendors. Modular building extends that trend to construction. “This is really a huge, huge movement in the industry,” says Lynch. “We are starting to see how the construction industry looks more and more like the manufacturing industry every day as they use these offsite techniques. I think it’s the next big thing in the global construction industry.”
Ron Bauer, one of the owners of Trumbull-Nelson, a general contractor and construction management company in Hanover, says using prefabricated materials is among the options they employ. “It’s something we look at fairly quickly. We look at the pros and cons of each system and see what fits the project requirements best.” For instance, when building The Woodlands at Harvest Hill, an independent living housing project in Lebanon, the construction schedule didn’t allow enough time for traditional framing. Trumbull-Nelson used prefabricated, panelized floor and wall systems. “If it’s a wood-framed building, there’s a good chance it will at least be prepaneled,” Bauer says. “It’s not 100 percent, that’s for sure. But if the building is relatively simple, then it’s usually cost effective.”
He says that’s particularly true because field labor is a problem. However, Bauer says you must weigh that against the time factory fabrication takes. “It can be very effective on the right projects,” agrees Preston Hunter, vice president of Eckman Construction in Bedford. “It works great for buildings that are simple geometric shapes. You can fabricate the panels offsite in a more controlled environment and then install them onsite.”
But, Hunter says, it takes more lead time. “If you have the luxury of taking the time to get the panels fabricated offsite first, it can accelerate the pace of the project. It can be very good if working through a winter and you need to get enclosed as quickly as possible to protect from the elements.”
Howell, of Newforma, says the industry is leaning toward more prefab because “with the quality control in factory conditions, they can manufacture to much finer tolerances than banging a nail into something on the job site and pouring concrete.”
Overall, it is quicker to assemble pre-manufactured buildings onsite than doing all construction onsite. “Right now some of the street closures for building projects can be 18 months to two years long,” Howell says. “The idea with pre-manufactured buildings is that if all of the construction was done in the factory and all of the assembly was done onsite, it would disrupt the area for a much shorter period of time.”
For years, prefab has been a go-to solution for projects like hospitals, prisons, hotels and apartment buildings that have repetitive features like bedrooms, bathrooms and operating rooms. Lynch says that prefabrication now includes the heating and air conditioning ductwork, which is then brought to the job site strictly for assembly, removing “a lot of the variables.”
But it’s expected that in a few years “offsite construction won’t be limited just to the boxy type assemblies” more common today, Lynch says. “I think we’ll see the abilities for teams to customize and do more unique structures in the future,” he says. “We’ll see prefab and offsite construction applied much more broadly.”