16 Expert Opinion Rory Bergin More Homes Through Manufacture A Housing Forum Working Group Report EXPERT OPINION: WHY WOULDN’T YOU BUY A FACTORY BUILT HOME? MANUFACTURED HOUSES WILL ALLOW CONSUMERS TO CUSTOMISE THEIR HOUSES, SAYS ARCHITECT RORY BERGIN here are many good reasons why new modern homes should be made in a factory. There are no good reasons why they shouldn’t. Practically everything else we use in our lives comes from a factory and we are very happy with them. We expect our cars, TVs, computers and phones to be mass-produced, and would be very surprised to fi nd that they weren’t. In fact we wouldn’t buy them if we found that they were hand-made by a group of people brought together in a muddy fi eld and given instructions in a language not their own, and chosen because they provided the lowest price, or just happened to be available that day. That’s how a lot of housing is currently constructed in the UK. Manufactured homes are more likely to meet the stringent quality standards demanded by regulations for new homes because it’s much easier to check quality when the product is being made in a warm building, out of the wind and rain. Workers of all ages and backgrounds can be employed in a factory because they are not expected to carry heavy loads up ladders, or withstand the cold. So the workforce can be from a wider demographic and different backgrounds. In the current economic conditions this factor is lowering the cost of building homes in a factory as wages for fully employed people are stable. The selfemployed sub-contractors who do much of the work on traditional building sites are raising their wages as much as possible because they can. In the rush to build homes, there is a shortage of labour such as bricklayers and carpenters, so the ones that are available can charge more for their skills. Factories are less exposed to this wage infl ation because their workers are permanently employed and therefore can’t demand increases in their wages at short notice. Factory owners tell me that last year, their homes were more expensive to build than traditional buildings, but could be built more quickly. This year they can be built for the same price, but more quickly, and next year they will be cheaper to build, and more quickly. There is a further promise of factory production which is the expectation that someday we will be able to order our home online and change the design to suit ourselves. If this sounds far-fetched, they have been doing this in Japan for decades. Companies with familiar names like Toyota have constructed tens of thousands of such homes for their customers, most of which have been customised to some degree. Factories with a high degree of automation can cope with a change in design easily, provided that the robot can be given the correct template to use; it doesn’t care if it does the same job ten times a day, or ten different jobs. The key element is that the robot is given a template to work from. Customisation does not mean that the customer can have what they want in every case; it means they can choose from a wide range of features, which ensures that no two houses are ever the same. It only takes nine variants in a house design to produce over 300,000 different homes, so customers can be satisfi ed that they have a unique product and the factory can continue to produce a unique design from relatively standardised components. There is a reason why the difference in quality between a factory-made home and a traditionally built home is not obvious to the average housebuyer or renter. No-one tells them, and the quality difference is not refl ected in the sales price. We have the ridiculous situation where the location and number of bedrooms in a property sets the value, and the quality of the fi nished home counts for
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