Modular construction company Low Carbon Construction (LCC) is aiming to deliver 10,000 homes a year from 2019 onwards using innovative temporary ‘onsite’ factories.
An example of modular housebuilding. LCC plans to build temporary factories on building sites
Simon Allso, the main shareholder in the group, told Inside Housing that it plans to become one of the country’s largest house builders from next year.
LCC intends to use temporary modular factories that it calls ‘Offsite/Onsite’, which are assembled on the development site and then removed once building is complete.
Mr Allso said this method would mean more uniform costs between high and low-value parts of the country as the cost of constructing the homes would not differ.
Construction can be more expensive in areas of higher housebuilding due to increased competition for materials and labour, although the cost of housing is also dictated by land.
LCC aims to reduce the cost of land through grant, taking over developers’ Section 106 contributions at reduced land prices, and buying discounted land from local authorities.
The company’s strategy is an attempt to avoid the problem of demand faced by conventional methods of offsite construction.
With a large factory site, high demand is required to bring down prices, but without this pipeline prices are too high to attract demand – a problem widely seen as a major factor in the slow growth of the offsite industry in the UK.
LCC itself previously had a factory in Portsmouth, but was forced to close it in September 2015.
The smaller, onsite factories are designed to deliver 250 homes a year each, and according to Mr Allso LCC will build as many as are necessary on each site.
Mr Allso told Inside Housing: “The goal, which we’re well on the way to, is 50 individual strategic land purchases in 2018, giving us 30,000 individual plots, and from 2019 10,000 units a year. That’s what we’re geared up to do with our supply partners. That is proving, since we launched this, a low target. We now know that it’s going to be more than that.”
Original link - Inside Housing
