Is Prefabricated Housing Easy to Do?

There are both advantages and challenges in the production of prefabricated housing, and whether it is easy to do requires comprehensive consideration.

Significant Production Advantages

• Efficient Production and Rapid Delivery: Chinese prefabricated housing factories demonstrate strong efficient production capabilities. Taking a factory in Hengshui, Hebei as an example, it takes only 15 to 25 days to build a house, and it can be delivered to overseas customers within three months. Modular buildings complete most of the construction processes in the factory, using parallel operations and automated production lines. Compared to traditional construction, the construction period can be significantly shortened by more than 60%, which greatly improves production efficiency and meets the market's demand for rapid delivery.
• Outstanding Cost Advantages: China has abundant and inexpensive labor resources, along with a close-knit local supply chain and significant economies of scale. In the Weifang area, factories producing steel structures, insulation panels, doors and windows, and spare parts are densely distributed, providing convenient conditions for the production of prefabricated housing and effectively reducing production costs, giving prefabricated housing a certain price competitiveness.

Facing Many Challenges

• Fierce Competition and Low Profits: The competition in the prefabricated housing industry is extremely fierce, with over 1,000 prefabricated housing factories in China alone, leading to severe homogenization. This has resulted in a significant dilution of profits, with a substantial drop in the ex-factory prices of some products. The profit per set is now only 1,000 to 2,000 yuan, and it is expected that more than one-third of the factories will exit the market due to inability to sustain operations in the coming years.
• Quality Issues to be Resolved: There are some non-negligible quality issues with prefabricated housing. Compared to well-built self-built houses in rural China, its structural stability is relatively poor, and cracks and water leakage are prone to occur at module connections. In addition, the design of some cement prefabricated houses is not flexible enough, and their thermal insulation performance and seismic performance in earthquake-prone areas need further research and improvement to meet the needs of different regions and customers.