Scaling Better Building Methods

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Industrialized Construction: The Case for Modular highlights the potential for industrialized construction to improve productivity and material efficiency, overlap factory production with site work, reduce weather-related delays, and generate cost and schedule savings. The DOE also points to potential benefits in waste reduction, building quality, and energy performance. Yet technologies that appear promising on paper have often struggled to reach widespread adoption. In 2024, modular and panelized construction together accounted for only about 3 percent of completed single-family homes under the Census Bureau definitions analyzed by the National Association of Home Builders, despite decades of interest in off-site construction.

The lack of adoption of these solutions by the homebuilding industry can be attributed to several factors. For one, building a home requires coordination among developers, architects, engineers, manufacturers, general contractors, subcontractors, suppliers, lenders, insurers, building officials, utilities, and others. A new technology can improve one piece of the process while creating difficulties somewhere else.

A factory-built system may save labor but require expensive transportation or cranes. A new material might perform well but face inconsistent code approvals. A manufacturer may need standardized designs and predictable demand to operate efficiently while developers want flexibility from project to project. A new component may not integrate easily with conventional trades or building systems. Builders may also be reluctant to take on the cost and risk of changing processes that they already understand.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Offsite Construction for Housing Research Roadmap identifies barriers spanning regulation and standards, finance and insurance, project delivery, workforce, and business models, illustrating that scaling construction innovation involves much more than proving that a technology works. Recent industry experience reinforces this point. At HUD’s 2025 Industrialized Housing Summit, participants discussed challenges ranging from state-by-state building requirements and local zoning to the operational knowledge needed to run factories efficiently.

Your solution might address:

• Manufacturing or factory efficiency
• Fragmented supply chains or procurement
• Transportation and on-site installation
• Interoperability between new and conventional building systems
• Labor or workforce requirements
• Standardization and customization
• Code compliance or technical approval
• Material waste or reuse
• Coordination between design, manufacturing, and construction
• Another specific barrier to widespread adoption

You do not need to redesign the entire housing construction industry. In fact, a focused solution to one specific bottleneck may be more practical and scalable than an idea that attempts to solve every challenge at once. The goal is to identify what is standing between a better way of building and widespread adoption and develop a practical way to remove that barrier.