The way we build homes hasn’t changed much in decades—and that’s an issue. Gaetan Royer, CEO of Massive Canada, joins this episode of the REAL TIME podcast to explain how new technologies, such as prefab modular housing, can help address  Canada’s housing crisis by improving the efficiency of home building.

From how it saves builders and homebuyers money, to the benefits to the environment, communities, and jobs, host Shaun Majumder gets the low-down on everything prefab housing.

Transcript

Shaun Majumder: Duh. This just sounds like such an obvious thing to do to increase the efficiency.

Gaetan Royer: One thing is not going to solve the housing crisis. There's a lot of things that need to happen.

Shaun: The housing crisis is probably one of the more pressing issues in our country today, and everybody's looking for solutions. How fast can we build? How many do we need to build? What are the barriers in the way? I think one of the things that I've been hearing a lot about has been this modular housing, modular homes, prefab homes. I don't know much about it.

Today, I am really excited to talk to a gentleman named Gaetan Royer. He is the CEO of Massive Canada Building Systems. He knows a lot about this. He's been in the industry for 40 years doing construction, everything from being an architect to an urban planner. Now, his sole focus is to get prefab and modular housing in the main lane. It will hopefully solve a lot of our problems. Let's find out.

Gaetan, thank you so much for joining us here on REAL TIME. Gaetan Royer, listen, Massive Canada is the name of your company. I love that name, by the way. Tell me a little bit about how you got started. When was that moment where you said, "Okay, this is the way we have to go"? Tell me a bit about Massive Canada's mission.

Gaetan: Yes. Thank you for hosting this. This is an awesome opportunity. I really appreciate it. I've been in construction for all my life, for years. Every time that I come out of a building that's under construction, resolving an issue that's been taking place, I always shake my head, thinking there's got to be a better way to build. Three years ago, I was invited to join a group that was looking at innovating construction materials and decided to grow this from just dealing with construction materials to dealing with how we build, going back to first principles and understanding the problem of how low the productivity is on a typical construction site.

We still, to this day, build things by hand, piece by piece. On a large project, a six-story building, there's millions of pieces that are brought individually and assembled by tradespersons. Sometimes they get in the way of each other, and sometimes there's delays. It takes two and a half to three years to build a typical building. Three years ago, to answer your question directly, I set out to design a better way to build as opposed to just dealing with construction material and solving individual problems. Let's go back to see if we can find better ways to build.

Shaun: It sounds like issues that you saw personally from working in construction for 40 years, inefficiencies, disconnected systems, it sounds like, where you thought productivity is so slow. I feel like when we think about construction, it's just become the way it is. We've taken it for granted, it feels like. It's like, well, it just takes that long. You're saying what Massive is doing is looking at those very systems and saying, "No, no, no. We've been taking it for granted for too long. We can take it up a notch and do things differently." Is that a fair assessment?

Gaetan: Absolutely. Absolutely. There's a housing crisis that's afflicting Canada and many other countries. A lot of it has to do with population growth and immigration, but an enormous amount of the housing crisis is a result of us not building fast enough. It's a huge market. When there's a lack of supply of housing, that creates huge market opportunities, and there should be a rush to build fast. Somehow, we can't finish a building under two, two and a half years. In our system, we set out to complete a six-story building under one year, under 12 months, and this is our goal, and we're going to get there.

Shaun: Let's get into this in even more detail. I want to get in because I'm not a builder. I've dealt with builders, but I've never understood what is that process from drawings to finished product. What are the ways that people have been doing it up until the last few years in terms of taking this different modular prefab approach? What is the standard way, how subcontractors-- Talk to me about numbers of people that are working on-site, how they all communicate, how they work in terms of timelines, et cetera. What was the old way?

Gaetan: The old way is the trades, the various subcontractors, and there's going to be anywhere from 30 to 40 subcontractors on a typical job, especially larger jobs like the kinds of buildings we need, the six-story apartment buildings with rental and affordable housing. All these folks are going to be coming in and working one after the other. They are going to be doing the framing by hand, and then the various trades follow each other. There's not a whole lot of communication because they don't work in the building at the same time.

The electrician put power for a ventilation fan at the wrong place for some reason, and the person installing the ventilation fan says, ''Well, I can't do this because the plug is on the wrong side of the beam. I would have to cut the beam.'' That triggers a whole series of delays. That triggers the fact that now we have to work for the structural engineer to authorize cutting into a beam. Those things take an awful lot of time, and it's organized chaos. I feel so much respect for the typical general contractor managing that chaos every day.

Shaun: Right. You have a general contractor who's been hired to take the entire job, and they hire subcontractors, and the subcontractors are individuals or small companies that have their own businesses in whatever trade that specific group of people are. Is that correct?

Gaetan: That's correct. Yes. There's a layer of contracts, multiple layers, in a very fragmented industry.

Shaun: Just from a 10,000, 20,000-foot view of that, I can see that being incredibly chaotic, especially if the communication isn't absolutely clear and it's all funneling through one. I would think that it's like, ''Oh, no, here are the drawings. Do it exactly like this.'' 

Gaetan: Well, those drawings are incredibly complex, and there's complexities that have been added over the years. There's now building envelope consultants that design exactly how a building is going to perform in terms of energy conservation. Right there, there's multiple layers of insulation and vapor barrier and rain screen, air spaces. All of these tend to have created multiple additional subcontractors who specialize in those various things. What we do, the solution that we bring is to do all of this inside of a factory where people are working side by side on workstations.

It's the part of the building that moves on an assembly line, and we get the various steps added up. If there's an issue that presents itself, the two people are going to be working side by side. They just talk to each other and resolve the problem. If there's a detail that requires structural engineer to be involved, that person is upstairs, so they don't have to wait a week for that person to come to the site. It's an incredible increase in efficiency when you move a large part of the construction off-site.

Shaun: This sounds to me like, pardon the very high intelligent academic language, but, duh, this just sounds like such an obvious thing to do to increase the efficiency. This sounds like something that should have happened a long time ago, but moving forward on the positive side, this can really ramp up productivity in our nation.

Gaetan: Absolutely. To explain in a bit more detail what we bring to the table here is, I talked about going back to first principles. We looked at a typical condo apartment. You walk into a condo apartment and what is expensive, what is complicated and difficult to build? There's a plumbing wall between the bedroom and the kitchen, and there's ventilation, there's a hot water system, there's an electrical panel. We take all of these things and we put them in one box that we call it condo core. It has about 80% of the value of the entire apartment inside that box.

Now, just figure the wall between the bedroom and the living room in a typical apartment. That takes the trades an hour to build. It's a wall with nothing in it. There's a couple of outlets at the bottom of the wall. There's maybe a switch by the door. Otherwise, it's just a blank wall between two rooms. All of these we bring to this site, prefabricated, but they're all flat-packed. The floors and the walls are just flat-packed on a truck and they're craned into place, attached to that condo core, that big box that I talked about.

That box is what's so expensive to build on site because you've got all these trades that are involved and following each other to build all of this, crouching on their knees under the sink and climbing on ladders to install the lights in the ceiling. We do this in a factory with all the tools at people's hands. We do a lot of pre-assembly as well. It's a different way to-- completely different from what's been done before.

Shaun: Getan, at CREA, a big part of CREA's mandate is to support community. Communit