Visit builders and suppliers around the world, as Art Schmon has, and you’ll find they all complain about the same things: Poor construction quality and a shortage of good workers. But unlike their peers in North America, builders elsewhere have embraced a solution–manufactured housing.

It’s time, Schmon says, for this continent to catch up.

To that end, Schmon and his partners at Forest Economic Advisors (FEA) are staging the Industrialized Wood-Based Construction Conference (IWBC) in Boston on Oct. 24-26. The event will bring together some of the world’s leading experts in factory-built housing and the use of mass timber in design.

The keynoters include:

• Gerry McCaughey, founder and CEO of Ireland’s Century Homes and California’s Entekra, a factory-based home construction company that recently got a $45 million investment from LP Corp.
• Michael Green, a Canadian who is one of this continent’s most famous champions of mass timber construction. His Vancouver architecture firm recently was acquired by Katerra, a Silicon Valley-based firm that has generated a lot of publicity recently for its work in factory construction.
• Tedd Benson, founder of Bensonwood, a maker of timber-frame and custom passive homes, and Unity Homes, a New Hampshire firm that creates in a factory the components it uses to erect houses.
• Andrew Waugh, a British architect known in part for building one of the world’s first high-rise buildings to be constructed from cross-laminated timbers.
• Dave Walsh, a Marriott executive whose company has embraced modular construction in the creation of its hotels worldwide and seen dramatic results in construction time as a result.
• Chris Toomey, vice president for major products at McKinsey & Co. and an expert on labor productivity in construction.

As befits a conference with a global theme, Schmon says the idea for IWBC was born in a pub in New Zealand where he and a fellow partner at FEA were chatting with a colleague from Legal and General, a British company that builds modular homes.

“New Zealand is suffering from the same kinds of illness that the rest of the world suffers from, namely extremely poor construction productivity and severe shortages of labor on site,” Schmon told ProSales in an interview today. “And we realized those two drivers were universal. The other thing we discussed was the fact that the rest of the world seemed to be arriving at a solution quicker than North America.”

That solution is off-site construction, in which a home’s components are built in a factory and then brought to the job site. One U.S. example is the KB Projekt home in Las Vegas, which was erected in just three days using materials brought to the site by Entekra, though most of the action in America today involves multifamily housing, assisted living facilities, hotel/motel construction, and student housing.

Schmon stressed that the factory-built idea goes beyond trusses and wall panels. “We’re talking about the integration of design, procurement, fabrication, delivery and assembly–end to end, ideally under one roof,” he said. “And of course, that integration of the supply chain involves mass timber, modularized construction, panelized construction, and lots of hybrids. This isn’t about trusses and wall panels, but trusses and wall panels are included in it. “

“People [in North America] confuse offsite construction with mobile homes,” Schmon continued. “Basically there’s a perception that it means cheap or lower quality. In Europe, people have the opposite perception. Swedes wouldn’t think of building a house onsite. Virtually all residential construction is offsite construction, with millimeter-perfect tolerances, where it doesn’t rain or snow. They’re using dried, stable materials. The resulting product is higher quality than anything you could put up [by building onsite]. … Four guys with hammers and saws aren’t going to be as accurate as a factory with CNC machines and robots.”

Schmon concedes that factory-built housing has been promoted for years as the coming thing. “A lot of people might say, ‘Hey, we’ve seen this movie before.’ But we haven’t seen this particular movie before because we haven’t had the labor shortage than we have now,” he said. “We see an inexorable trend toward offsite construction.”

This trend will take time–perhaps 20 years–to become a standard for new-home construction, he predicted. And it won’t be the solution for every type of construction; custom homes and remodeling probably will continue to be done as they are now. Costs for these houses still need to come down, he added. But once again, if you look overseas, people are finding solutions.

Note: ProSales is a media sponsor of the IWBC.