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Component Manufacturing dverti$er
Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
Adverti$er
January 2020 #12246 Page #94
Why Modular Home Factories Need to Expand Right Now! By Gary Fleisher
Traditional new home site builders are facing labor shortages in not only skilled trades but also in basic framing. This shortage is having a ripple effect on the cost of hiring people from a shrinking pool of skilled labor creating rising costs and longer build times.
J
ust in case you haven’t looked out your window lately, new home construction is happening everywhere, especially on the East and West Coast.
That is why panelized wall and truss factories like Katerra, Entekra, and Builders FirstSource, are producing more product. SIP manufacturers are also ramping up production. Every type of offsite production factory is either expanding their facilities or building or buying additional factory space to produce more product. Modular construction on the other hand has always been much slower to ramp up to meet demand for a variety of reasons. The big reason is the cyclical demand for new homes. 2008 is still a painful memory for the modular housing industry, especially in the East where many factories closed their doors forever due to no homes to build or having filed bankruptcy. Asking the surviving factories to expand to meet the demand for new custom and standard planbook homes simply isn’t in the cards for many factories. Fear of another recession is ever present.
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