Bob Ransford
Sun
Nearly a century ago, when my great-grandfather first settled in this part of the country, he lived in a home built in a factory in New Westminster and shipped in panels by barge to Steveston. That stately looking house — “modern” for its time — stood for more than 75 years.
In recent years, the image we’ve conjured up of factory-built homes are of the low-cost “single-wide mobile homes” mass-produced in the early 1950s as one of the solutions to the housing shortage caused by the return of veterans after the Second World War.
But the factory-built homes of today bear little resemblance to their ancestors of the last century and perhaps a bit more of a resemblance to the catalogue homes of the century before.
Gone are the boxy and flat-roofed mobile homes on cinder blocks. The new modular factory-built homes have high-pitched roofs, vaulted ceilings, winding staircases and floor plans of 2,000 square feet and more with modules combined.
Why, and how, will factory-built housing play an increasingly important role within the Canadian homebuilding industry in the future? Product enhancement and lifestyle marketing. Those are the two keys to the factory-built housing industry taking a bigger portion of future housing markets.
Better technology and choice of materials has allowed factory builders to offer more choices in design elements and living spaces to consumers. In many markets in Canada, modular home builders are able to ship modules almost as wide as a standard site-built home, offering larger, more open spaces.
In B.C, quirky highways regulations restrict module size during transport to a much smaller size than in other jurisdictions.
This means fewer design choices and more finish work being required on site to secure multiple modules together. These significantly more restrictive transport regulations also mean greater cost to homeowners. Cost is one of the factors allowing factory-built or modular home builders to have an edge in lifestyle marketing.
Vancouver-area homebuilder Shinya Mikawa, who has recently become a local dealer for a Lethbridge, Alberta-based factory-built home producer, Triple M Housing, still hopes to be able to deliver a single-storey bungalow to a lot in the lower Fraser Valley area at 30 to 40 per cent less than a comparable site-built home, even with the restrictive local transport regulations.
Two-storey homes, averaging slightly more than 2,000 square feet, will be priced 20 per cent lower than a site built home.
Looking at one of Mikawa’s renderings of the factory-built homes he is offering, it is difficult to find any aesthetic difference between it and a site-built home.
Part of the lifestyle marketing appeal of factory-built housing is the product’s superior quality. During the six weeks a home is in production in Ken Koda’s Lethbridge factory, every facet of the home construction takes place in a controlled environment.
Unlike site-built homes, where the home is built from the bottom-up and much of the wood frame is exposed to the elements, including rain and moisture, factory-built homes are built with dry lumber and shipped with a hinged roof attached.
Triple M’s quality control in the factory allows them to offer a 10-year warranty to home buyers, something that local dealer Mikawa believes will appeal to B.C. homebuyers frightened by the 1990s leaky condo crisis.
Another benefit of factory-built housing is the price certainty it offers in today’s construction market, which is experiencing continuous price escalations.
If you decide to build a site-built custom home today, you are likely exposing yourself to a moving target in terms of your final cost. Increases in material prices and the shortage of skilled trades can mean a substantial unknown variance.
Once your factory-ordered home is on the production line, the factory can fix the price for you with its stable work force and pre-ordered materials.
Factory-built housing may be one of the keys to finding an affordability advantage in future housing markets.
Bob Ransford is a public affairs consultant with COUNTERPOINT Communications Inc. He is a former real estate developer and a director of the Urban Development Institute – Pacific region.
E-mail: [email protected]
© The Vancouver Sun 2005
