How New Technology Is Changing Home Construction

The future of home construction is in great hands—ones that come with smart locks, auto-adjusted lighting, and that automate living itself.

Home construction, rather the construction sector at large, hasn’t been one to embrace new technology. In the old days, technology in construction was unforeseeable in its present scale. Today, it’s indispensable to achieving higher efficiency and productivity.

Yet its slow adoption puts construction professionals in a dilemma with dwindling profit margins. Meanwhile, more than 20% of contractors have tested drones to record site activity. As jobsite work turns more sensory through technology, customers of new home construction or renovation benefit from knowing how much gets done per day and whether their money is really spent on what was agreed.

Just as significant is the amplifying wave of smart home technology. Less prominent among the baby boomer crowd, smart homes represent a new-found passion of home ownership spearheaded by millennials.

As a result, the housing market is verging on a metamorphosis, one that brings the promise of convenience to consumers while offering contractors a chance to improve operations.

We’ve touched on technology big and small that’s slowly taking over the home construction niche. Hop on!

3D Laser Scanners

Experts in emerging technology believe that builders will need to adapt fast as housing demands look to rise to an additional 100 billion square feet by 2030.

Homes come in various styles and sizes with one unchanged factor—affordability. In the yesteryears of the industry, construction companies were compelled to use manual measurements in floor planning. While not entirely inaccurate, human measurements involve a certain margin of error. This can lead to improper space allocation within the plot of land the house is being built on. Running the risk of occupying more land than permitted by the city or lesser than available can escalate costs, either via city-imposed fines or re-planning efforts.

Laser scanners bring down error margins by capturing a structure down to 2 millimetres worth of accuracy. Plotting coordinates precisely on a digital chart, 3D scanners allow site supervisors and workers to mark off each section of the floor plan without second thoughts.

Contractors are realizing the advantages of automating time-consuming functional tasks. They can build workflows quicker than expected and manage deficiencies, change orders, and inspections within schedule and budget constraints.

AR-VR Wearables

The days where we can see through walls are here. If we’re being honest, that’s possible with augmented reality and virtual reality wearables using which construction workers access three-dimensional renderings of your final house build.

Tuning into VR headsets or Google Glass, workers would no longer have to guesstimate when carrying out construction activities. Take the case of floor rotting in houses due to undetected moisture caused by water slopping back to the house foundation. Floor damages can be prevented by gathering real-time data about the site’s evolving conditions, which aids remediation within planned timelines.

 

Cloud-Based Interactive Platforms

In the residential construction market, builders often develop community-specific housing units, buildings in sprawling complexes, and a host of alternative housing projects aimed at certain demographics.

All of them have one common denominator—community. When occupants begin settling in, they feel the need to communicate, act neighbourly, and want to participate in the daily upkeep and long-term development goals of the locality. Capitalizing on this need to stay connected, builders are on-boarding cloud-based communication software for community interaction and management. From booking common-use facilities to filing re-development requests, resident community members can effectively lead a more organized and convenient lifestyle. In the client context, construction management software is evolving to be the preferred choice of communication. Here’s how construction companies can avoid choosing an unfit cloud platform.

It isn’t uncommon to design and empower communities with technology today. Endorsing the sentiment, Peter Pietrzkiewicz, CEO of Concierge Plus, says, “Offering an online community website is now a critical component of such product positioning. Condo buyers are tech-savvy and they really value knowing that the developer from whom they are making an important purchase is as well.”

Advancing communities through innovative tech is at the tipping point. More trends in this space are helping builders accommodate desires for a higher quality of living, from homeowners and renters alike.

Pre-Fabricated Construction

As the construction industry matures into new forms of construction, the divide between the traditionally-minded and modernist constructors grows.

Pre-fab construction is one such point of the divide. Used as a blanket term for houses and buildings built in a factory setting, prefab construction continues to appeal to small-size construction firms working to eliminate typical delays characteristic of standard construction projects. Many projects have known to close 25% faster and 25% cheaper when done the prefab way. According to Steve Glenn, CEO OF Plant Prefab, a Southern California-based modular housing company, “Building in cities has just never been more expensive.”

Pre-fab construction saves land costs, labour costs, and operating costs. Despite widely pronounced benefits, clients say many variables make that debatable. Here’s a well-informed take by Procore on why prefab construction poses pesky challenges.

Future Reckonings

Home construction technology will remain a work-in-progress in one way or another. While one section of the industry includes ardent believers, many stakeholders are yet to come around to its competitive advantages.

With smart building materials—smart concrete, smart glass, self-healing coatings—pervading construction projects, companies are en route to making structures safer, durable, and more functionally capable than ever imagined. A hyper-connected society of today’s world yearns for smartly equipped, responsive living spaces. The inefficiencies of yesterday are expected to evolve into breakthroughs of tomorrow.

Bringing smart capabilities through new building technology requires in part that builders use sustainable engineering, and for the rest, consumers to present a united front in maintaining high-tech residential spaces. Given that these structures can automatically adjust to weather adversities and repair themselves, they may not always fall in the affordability brackets of most families seeking non-traditional housing solutions.

Negotiating affordability with new technology dangles the age-old question, “who will buy it?”—one that’ll keep probing the industry toward the next horizon in achieving affordable and well-equipped housing.

Unless consensus for this overdue change means everyone’s on the same page, home construction would stay unaffected, regardless of the degree and quality of technological innovation.