Speed, Quality and Price: No Longer an Impossible Triangle
For as long as I can remember, there has been a traditional rule in construction, a secret passed from old builders to their young proteges. The rule states that a builder can offer customers two out of three of the following, but not more: speed, quality, and price.
- You can have good quality delivered in a short time, but it will cost you a lot more
- You can have quick delivery and a good price, but your quality will suffer
- You can have good quality for a good price, but it will take a long time to deliver
This rule, also referred to as the “Impossible Triangle,” has been passed on between builders, traded as an inside joke or a knowing look when a customer asks for all three at once, and up until recently, has been the honest truth for homebuilders and their customers. Modular has changed all that. Modular, because of the efficiency of building in a plant and concurrent to the permitting process, allows builders to deliver on speed while keeping quality high and price equal (or even sometimes slightly less). If I had to give an insider’s perspective on modular to the consumer, it would be that if you are going to build modular, you should expect to pay equally (or only slightly less) for a custom modular home as for a comparable custom stick-built home (“comparable” is a difficult thing to gauge, because stick-built home quotes typically start off as 2×4 construction, aren’t necessarily ENERGY STAR, can use cheaper construction techniques, etc.). To get a quality product, you have to pay a fair price; that rule is the same as it always has been. What has changed is that the modular builder is now able to build you a quality product in much less time than the stick builder, because the application of time to the construction timeline has changed, so the traditional rule has been broken in a way that favors you. That is where savings come in: because the carry cost of land under construction is expensive, as is living somewhere else while you’re waiting for your home to be completed,the abbreviated timeline translates to less associated costs. Because now more than ever time savings translates to cost savings, the modular process ultimately is the cheaper way to go when you consider time as a commodity. So while the age-old rule of speed, quality and price is still true for traditional builders, the modular world has created a world where you can have it all.
Tags: Construction, construction timeline, homebuilding, impossible triangle, modular, residential, time
This entry was posted on Thursday, March 11th, 2010 at 9:48 pm and is filed under Construction, Modular Construction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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You hit on an interesting point that lots of people discount: time literally is money in construction. The phrase means something in a vacuum, but when you factor in land costs and carry, time literally means money.
Thanks for the comment, Tim. It has become an over-used term, but anyone who’s been through the construction process knows how expensive the “you gotta live somewhere while it’s under construction” factor is…especially when a homebuilding project is plagued by delays. I would like to add that because so much of the home is complete by the time it is set on the foundation, a lot of otherwise “uncontrollable” delays inherent in stick building are also avoided; not all, but many.