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This custom modular home comprises 17 modules provide 7,200 square feet of floor space. Photo courtest of Epoch Homes.
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By Richard Wall
If someone said you could build a stronger house faster and cheaper, would you be interested? If you thought "yes" for even an instant, you might want to know what the modular building industry was telling builders at IBS 2007. To help make their modular point, Ritz-Craft Corporation of Pennsylvania shipped in a modular home and finished it in a few days for the show.
In fact, reducing the time spent building is one of the modular benefits, says Dave Wrocklage, director of sales and marketing for Epoch Homes. Wrocklage, whose company has been building modular mansions in southern Connecticut for about 10 years, also emphasizes the customized nature of modular homes in the IBS seminar on modular construction he co-presented. "With the add-on products, panelized bump-outs, reversed gables, boxed out bays, and so forth, modular homes are not boxy anymore," says Wrocklage.
When modular won't do
The vast majority of residential houses can be built in modular fashion. "Your client can sketch out a design on a napkin, and our designers can modularize that plan," says Wrocklage. But because those modules — complete with painted interior walls, carpeting, stairs, etc. — are shipped on a flatbed truck, they have to clear overpass bridges. "We can't build our ceiling systems any higher than 10 feet," says Wrocklage. "We can do two-story foyers or cathedral ceilings, but we couldn't do 12-foot ceilings all through the house. Some contemporary designs don't go well as modular homes, like wide open spaces, big 50-by-50 spaces."
If the building site is not accessible to a large flatbed truck and the crane needed to off-load the module, a modular approach won't work. And if you are a builder who truly loves to pound all the nails, modular construction might not be for you. "For a lot of builders, selling more homes is not what they want to do," says Wrocklage. "They want to build the homes."
Lean times lead to new ways
"Now that it's getting tough for most builders, they are looking for ways to reduce their overhead, ways to build more efficiently, ways to protect their interests and protect their risk," says Kevin Flaherty, a modular-seminar presenter at IBS and VP of sales and marketing for Genesis Homes.
Go through a modular factory — and that's part of what Flaherty's seminar did with a video presentation — and you'll find crews stick-building houses. It's in an environment protected from weather, and the tradesmen work in an assembly-line operation with multiple quality control inspections. Every house on the line might have a different floor plan.
Builders new to modular face a slight learning curve. "The builder has to understand how to price properly for the customer," says Wrocklage. "He needs to understand how these modules and component pieces will be arriving on site and go together. A crew sets the house on the foundation and erects the roof system, but the builder has responsibility for tying it all together. Being as customized as we are today, every house is its own project. And a lot of it is under the direction of the builder."
The Modular Payoff
Stronger, faster, cheaper — how? Wrocklage and Flaherty offer the following points.
- Automatic green. Because of the material-resource use and the energy efficiency of the factory-production process, a modular home can get a builder halfway to LEED certification just by taking it off the truck. Additional green features can be added at the factory, where recycling is an obsession. The green advantage is a driving force in modular's growing appeal.
- Lower building costs. Most modular homes cost six to 15 percent less to build than a traditional on-site structure. Much of this comes from material savings and from labor savings to the builder. Modules arrive on site 80 percent complete. Many builders are concerned about the looming shortage of skilled tradesmen, and they see modular as a way around that rising cost. The more labor becomes an issue, the better modular looks.
- Reduced builder risks. Flaherty says that going modular significantly reduces builders' risks and associated costs, such as insurance, project management and supervision, inventory holdings and securing the jobsite. Faster building means less risk of losing buyers because of bankruptcy, divorce, job-loss, financing, and plain old changing their minds.
- Strong structures. A modular house has to be strong enough to be shipped and lifted by a crane with straps. "We're using 2x6 studs, all plywood, Kohler fixtures, Pella windows, all the things a high-end stick builder would use," says Wrocklage. Modular manufacturers always build to IRC code, even if that isn't required in a local market. They meet any local code requirement, including high-wind zone criteria. Code compliance is checked before delivery.
- Fast completion. An experienced modular builder can assemble the modules in a day or two, with all finishing completed in a few weeks. Building houses faster means you can build more of them. Materials don't sit around on the job site, attracting mold or thieves. "There's a huge push to doing teardowns in urban areas, where people are replacing junky houses on their valuable property," says Wrocklage. "We can compress the time those people are out of their home into a few months. That's a huge advantage, not to mention less time disturbing your neighbors with construction."
For more information on modular construction, go to www.NAHB.org/modular.
Richard Wall writes about the building industry from St. Augustine, Fla.
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