Factory-Made Parts Enter More New Homes

By Evan Perez

From The Wall Street Journal Online

Oct. 15, 2002 -- Parts of Jennifer and Brian Mitchell's dream home in Grand Blanc, Mich., started out in a factory 60 miles away.

Workers at a former warehouse in Detroit poured concrete from overhead vats to form basement walls. Elsewhere in the plant, robots nailed sheets of plywood together over floor beams to make big eight-foot-wide sections of flooring.

Pulte Homes Inc., the largest U.S. homebuilder, based in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., trucked those parts, along with pre-fabricated interior and exterior walls, to the subdivision where the Mitchells had selected a lot. There, workers assembled the parts into a two-story, three-bedroom house that listed for $150,000.

Builders call this kind of construction panelization, and it is becoming increasingly popular in the surging home-building industry. Pulte and many other large, traditional builders are increasingly turning to the technique because, they say, it saves time and money, and helps maintain a high quality of construction.

One industry expert estimates that more than 10% of new houses now have some factory-built panelized parts up from practically nothing a decade ago.

Builders are often reluctant to say they are using this technique because of the drab, cookie-cutter image most people have of modular housing used in middle-class suburban developments. Modular housing, pioneered in William J. Levitt's boxy post-war houses of the 1940s and '50s, chiefly involved the preassembly of basic house framing at a factory, to be erected, then finished with drywall, wiring and plumbing on foundations already built at the site.

Panelization takes that concept further. Today, entire walls, including the studs, framing, and drywall, are assembled in factories. They can even be prewired for electricity before being trucked to the home site for final assembly. Concrete basement walls can be poured and cured at factories to be pieced together on a building lot at the builder's (and often the weather's) convenience. Staircases, exterior walls, structural beams also can now be prefabricated.

Panelization has gained speed in part because the quality of such parts has vastly improved in recent years. But another factor driving the shift toward factory-built panels is the shortage of skilled labor on construction sites.