
Many other markets across the globe have the same housing history that has led to the current situation of low affordability. Markets, like London, are taking similar approaches to bring innovation into the process with microhomes, 3D printing and prefab. Where will it lead?
It is generally agreed that the UK’s housebuilding sector has been very slow to innovate. We still build homes using labour-intensive technologies of bricks and mortar, while innovation in other sectors has been characterised by rapid and radical change.
But with demand for new housing high, and supply low, traditional housebuilders have had little reason to do things differently while barriers to entry remain high. You can’t come up with a clever app to revolutionise housebuilding or do away with land, construction and planning challenges.
Innovation is needed across the housing cycle, but innovations in housing construction and manufacturing could create a real step-change in the speed, quality and quantity of houses being built in the capital.
As the UK’s housing crisis deepens and as the supply of new homes fails to respond to demand, architects, engineers and investors have been working together on a new generation of manufactured homes. These are built offsite using precision manufacturing techniques and are assembled onsite in a matter of months, if not weeks.
This innovation has been driven by constraints such as the shortage, and cost, of traditional contractors. Pocket, a developer specialising in micro-homes, embraced modular construction a few years ago to bring down costs; in May it completed Europe’s tallest residential modular tower in Wandsworth. Each flat was built and fitted offsite, then craned into place at the rate of one storey per day. Earlier this year, across the Channel in Nantes, the Yhnova house was 3D-printed in a matter of days – a world first.