Prefabricated Building Mobile Houses

Mobile houses in prefabricated buildings mainly include two types: modular buildings and movable panel houses, which have significant differences in structure, function, and application scenarios.

Modular buildings focus on factory prefabrication, breaking down the building into independent modules (such as ceilings, floors, water and electricity pipelines, etc.), which are manufactured with millimeter-level precision on an assembly line and then transported to the site for assembly. Their core advantages are reflected in four aspects:

1. Efficient construction: The construction period is more than 60% shorter than that of traditional buildings. For example, a modular elderly care apartment purchased by British merchants was assembled in just two weeks after the arrival of 63 modules.
2. Quality control: The factory environment ensures that the positioning error of steel bars is measured in millimeters, avoiding human deviations in on-site construction.
3. Environmental protection and energy efficiency: It reduces on-site noise, dust, and construction waste, alleviates traffic congestion, and complies with the trend of green buildings.
4. Wide application: It is suitable for permanent or semi-permanent scenarios such as hotels, apartments, office buildings, hospitals, and data centers. The overseas market demand is strong. The export volume of prefabricated buildings in China increased nearly threefold from 2015 to 2025, and the growth rate reached 45% in the first quarter of 2026.

Movable panel houses, on the other hand, use light steel as the framework and sandwich panels as the enclosure materials, adopting standard modular design and bolt connections, with the characteristics of being detachable and easy to transport. Their features include:

1. Flexible adaptation: Components are prefabricated in the factory and assembled on-site. The area can be customized (15-160 square meters), adapting to complex terrains such as hillsides and grasslands.
2. Diverse types: They cover cement movable houses with steel structure load-bearing, lightweight and low-cost phosphorus-magnesium movable houses, and color steel panel houses with excellent thermal insulation performance (the latter uses colored-coated polyethylene foam sandwich panels with a lifespan of 10-20 years).
3. Emergency value: As temporary buildings, they were once used for the transitional resettlement of disaster victims in the Sichuan earthquake zone, equipped with water and electricity supply and public facilities to quickly restore basic living needs.

Both types of mobile houses embody the industrial thinking of “factory production + on-site assembly” in prefabricated buildings. However, modular buildings focus more on long-term use and high-end scenarios, while movable panel houses focus on temporariness and cost-effectiveness, jointly promoting the transformation of the construction industry towards efficiency and environmental protection.