Philly builder is doing more with less — and says his process could help solve construction’s labor problems

Developers in the Philadelphia region have been increasingly turning to modular construction as a way to save time and money.

The founder of Philadelphia-based Volumetric Building Cos. says it could also help solve the construction industry’s labor shortage and make the construction workforce more diverse. The company’s workforce is 21% women (compared with about 11% industry-wide) and nearly 27% people of color, vs. 13% industry-wide.

Volumetric Building Cos. CEO and founder Vaughan Buckley explained that in a modular construction factory, workers can complete useful construction tasks without needing the full physical abilities necessary to work as a contractor on a typical construction worksite. That means more people can be included, he said, and they can be trained more quickly, which allows for more rapid improvements in workforce size and diversity.

Buckley spoke with The Inquirer about how working for a modular construction company is different from traditional construction jobs, and more accessible.

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

The difference between modular and traditional construction is really where the work is performed. In traditional construction, it’s performed on the job site where the building is going, and in modular construction, we’re doing that work in a factory-controlled environment and sending the components to the job site for assembly rather than construction.

Our team will typically design the buildings, manufacture them in the plant, transport them to the field, and install them. The amount of resources that a general contractor needs on-site shrinks pretty significantly. We represent usually somewhere around half of the total budget just in the modular components.

When you look at the construction industry as a whole, one of the most interesting macro factors is average age. Over the last 10 years, the average age in the construction industry has gone up at approximately one year per year, indicating that we simply are not replacing people. The folks that are skilled in construction are retiring at a faster rate than we’re adding new people, so the end result is that the average age goes up rather than down.

We are not able to replace people that have 30, 40 years of tenure with people that have two years of experience and get the same quality and efficiency of output; it’s just not going to happen.

And so what VBC is doing — and why modular construction, in my mind, is such an important piece of the future — is that we have to build more with less. We have to make the ramp-up and training curve to allow someone to be a productive member of the construction industry shorter, and we also have to increase quality simultaneously. Those are really hard things to do unless you’re actually rethinking the way that you’re building.

There’s a couple of major differences. One is that our factory locations are all single story … it’s one big open area. You’re close to your work product and your skills. It means that you can do more with less folks, and you can learn your job quicker.

One of the biggest impacts from a training perspective when you’re in a factory environment is to think of it like an automotive assembly line. If I’m building consistent amounts of units every day, I can do the same task every day. So on a job site, for example, if I’m an electrician, I have to run the wire, then I come back later and I connect outlets, then I come back later and I put on the cover plates. In a factory, I can be doing cover plates all day every day, and don’t have to ever worry about doing wire because there’s always a unit at that stage of production on the line, which means that the skill that I need to teach somebody is much, much smaller in scope. I don’t have to have an electrician that understands every component from start to finish. I just need somebody that can understand how to run wire or how to install a cover plate.

That means the accessibility to the type of people that you can have in the plant is incredibly wide. We can have people in wheelchairs that are installing cover plates on a single floor element with accessible height. They don’t need to run wire in the ceiling. On a job site, you have to be able to do both, which really restricts the amount of people that you can have both from a physical perspective.

Typically frontline construction workers in the field are getting more like 2% female participation, and the construction industry as a whole is getting closer toward that 18% to 20% range recently, but most of that representation is in the back office. It’s rarely in the actual frontline construction work. One out of five people that are on our production floors [identify as] female.

Yeah, it’s an easy one. We don’t have [enough] housing, and we need to build it. I mean, we’ve had hundreds of thousands of openings in the construction industry for more than a decade. It’s not going anywhere. This problem is not going to solve itself, and a job opening is not a job filled.

I think that the idea that we’re taking jobs away from people is simply not true. We’re actually adding to the available workforce by encouraging more people to enter the space. And it doesn’t mean they get paid less, either. These are jobs that can be paid as much or higher than frontline production work because they can do more.

What we’re doing is still relatively new in the industry. Overall, modular and off-site construction has been around for the better part of the last century but has primarily produced single-family housing. We are dedicated to high-density housing primarily in urban environments, and that’s a trend that we see continuing significantly.

I think we’re going to continue to see it being used in high-density housing and hospitality to higher levels. But I think we’re also going to see it in areas where skilled labor is becoming so short and so expensive that it becomes difficult to meet the needs of the system. And that’s the areas like health care and education, I think are going to start to see more factory construction to both meet timeline needs and help them get the output levels that they have to have to support the population.