REAL TIME Episode 67: Building Better: Can Prefab Modular… – REAL TIME Episode 67: Revolutionizing Construction in Canada: The Promise of Prefab Modular Homes

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. Community building is huge. I would imagine that prefab and modular housing can also help to create communities.

Gaetan: Yes, absolutely. We have an exciting project that’s shaping up right now. I’d like to share our approach to that. This is a nonprofit project, a group that wants to deliver 500 homes. When we were talking about how to do that, there’s a component of this, which is going to be, we’re going to provide homes that are going to be prefabricated on site, assembled. Persons with disabilities, persons with some seniors are going to move in. That’s going to be one segment. There’s another segment that’s targeting people who are employable but don’t have skills, people who are hard to house and they need to get assistance in terms of support for the addictions, support for a variety of things.

That nonprofit is basically providing those services and planning for them. What we offer to them is to provide some job skills at the same time. Let’s have our condo core units. Which is going to be the kitchen, the bathroom, and all those elements. It would be very difficult for us to train people to do. There would be safety issues and so on. That part would be delivered to the site. Then the rest of the walls, they can build them themselves. What that does– this is still in theory, but I have a vision that this is exactly what these folks, the nonprofit, are envisaging is going to happen, is we’re going to give them some job skills.

We’re going to give them the ability to answer the question, “Have you done some work lately?” “Yes, I built my own home and within, I learned these particular skills in the process.” They’re going to live in an environment where they have a sense of ownership. You really care for something you’ve created yourself, right?

Shaun: Absolutely.

Gaetan: They’re going to be looking after their home. They’re going to have pride of what they’ve accomplished. They’re going to have a place to go and have a shower in the morning before going to an interview. As part of all the community support that is going to be provided to these 500 families that are going to live in this community, there’s going to be this additional thing, which is we’re helping these folks advance their job skills. Helping them to create a sense of community. All these people are going to be not working individually on their home. They’re going to be working in tandem with others, building their village.

I think those are the kinds of initiatives that, as a company, I want to support just on a human basis. What we’re providing, the modular unit that we’re providing, is facilitating that. It’s really exciting to look at the construction industry as a way to create better communities.

Shaun: Absolutely. It gives them a sense of purpose and then a timeline seeing from the beginning to then at the end. Nothing feels better than seeing something come to completion, and then to say, “This is mine,” that’s outstanding. What a beautiful, beautiful initiative. When I think about– I think we want to get into this a little more later, but the idea of these modular prefab housing, there would obviously be the assumption in my mind that, “Oh, you’re very limited to what you can do because you’ve got your factory that is just churning out these cookie-cutter walls that you’ve got it down to a system.”

A lot of people think prefab is tiny homes, and that’s all you can really do. Is there any truth to that? What are some big misconceptions about the type of spaces that you guys can prefab?

Gaetan: There’s quite a bit of prefab that’s tiny homes, or mobile homes, or smaller homes. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that transporting a bedroom is transporting a huge box full of air. We don’t do that. We don’t want to transport a lot of air. What we transport is this compact condo core, which is all the complex stuff. The equivalent to that is like going to IKEA. You buy shelving. You’re not going to buy it all completely built because that would take you five trucks.

Shaun: I wish. Gaetan, have you wrestled with IKEA furniture? Man, it can ruin marriages.

Gaetan: Absolutely. I’m with you on this one. What I’m saying is that it’s relatively simple for most people who are willing to read the instructions to assemble a cabinet. You don’t want to transport all this air, but you would not tackle the task of building your own IKEA fridge. You buy a fridge. It’s a big box full of air, but it’s so complicated. Our condo core is like a fridge. It’s very complex. The rest of the walls, they’re like flat-pack cabinets. Once you understand that, then our condo cores stack up like LEGO’s, up to 12 stories high. Attaching the walls and the floor panels to that, it happens very, very quickly. We’re talking weeks instead of years.

Shaun: If I imagine this new flow and this new chain of events that ends up revealing to the world this beautiful building, if the subcontractors are in the factory on the assembly line taking care of all that stuff, before you were saying on site in the traditional way, there’s 30 to 40 subcontractors. Once this box that is compressed with no air in it arrives on site, who then picks it up from there and how does the building get put together? What is their classification? If they’re not subcontractors, how does that process work? Who are these people then that tick, tick, tick, put it together?

Gaetan: There’s a BCIT in BC, the BC Institute of Technology, NAIT, the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology. I’m not sure in Ontario if there’s people who are being trained, but there’s programs, the same as we’re training electricians in technical colleges, there’s programs to train people to assemble the kinds of prefabricated systems we’re bringing to a construction site. There’s people who are specialized in doing that. What we’re not seeing in our project is an army of subcontractors because the electricity, everything has already been built into our system.

Shaun: The individuals who are onsite, they receive the boxes. What kind of number are you looking at comparatively to the 30 to 40? How many are there to put it all together? How many people does that usually take if we’re taking the equal amount that would be representative of 30 to 40 subcontractors for maybe what? Is that like a six-story building, or how would that translate?

Gaetan: For a six-story building, we had an independent report done. What they concluded is we would have, instead of 30 to 40, it would be about a dozen trades involved. Instead of two and a half years, it would be less than a year for construction. The cost, even though we’re a for-profit company, we’re going to do this to make money, our cost is going to be 20% lower than any builder who uses the least expensive construction method. The independent report compared our system to stick frame, just the standard wood framing building for a six-story building.

Shaun: You’re not cutting corners with what you’re using to build things with. It sounds like the place that you’re making up for in terms of cost is just efficiency.

Gaetan: Yes, it’s efficiency. We’re going to be providing a better quality product. We are using different materials. Instead of wood frame, we’re going to be using mass timber, which is– this is mass timber, cross-laminated timber.

Shaun: Tell me about mass timber. I don’t know anything about mass timber. Is it just cut logs?

Gaetan: Mass timber can be large-sized logs, but it tends to be engineered wood. Wood is very strong, but it has some flaws as well. Wood, there’s knots, there may be cracks. Engineered wood is wood that is going to be selected for its strength and its quality. Then it’s assembled together by gluing pieces, like glue-laminated beams, or gluing layers that are going to be going in different directions, perpendicular to each other. One piece of wood like this, and the next one perpendicular to it. That’s cross-laminated timber panels.

Shaun: Gaetan, talk to me a bit about the benefits of prefab housing. There’s so many. In terms of, number one, environmentally, is this a better way to build? Is it easier on the environment? Talk to me how that trickles down to general economic growth in either a community or across the nation. Obviously, we touched on speed. Then how it can really impact the very thing that most people are talking about right now in this country, which is the housing crisis.

Gaetan: Yes. Let’s start with that, the housing crisis. The human impact of this housing crisis is very real. There are seniors becoming homeless, young families that are finding it extremely difficult to put food on the table because shelter is so expensive. We have to do our part to contribute to that, to speed up access to housing and to lower the cost of housing.

Our system, and for all the modular builders who are using engineered wood, it’s a far less wasteful way to use wood. The amount of construction waste in our landfills is north of 30%. Around the world, it’s somewhere between 30% and 34% in most jurisdictions. Metro Vancouver, 32% of the landfills, 32% of what’s collected is ending up as construction waste. In a manufacturing plant, you’re going to have much better control of the inputs. The various pieces that are coming in, you utilize 100% of what you bring to the plant. Then, because it’s a controlled environment, you can deal with the recycling.

Any leftover, all the sawdust is being collected and reused because it can be packaged and collected on a worksite, it just blows in the wind. We also want to make sure that when we talk about labor, I think in terms of where the economy is going, one of the issues that we’re facing in construction is a labor shortage. There’s fewer skilled labor than we need. That drives the prices up, of course, when something is in short supply. It is a world where, for young people, it’s very difficult to make a living. They end up working on a job, and then the subcontractor that they work for does not get the next bid, so they’re laid off for a few weeks or a month.

They’re jobs that are not as secure as a manufacturing job where you offer permanent work, benefits. For young people working in the rain, in the snow, in the hot weather conditions on worksite, roofing in August is not pleasant. To start working in a manufacturing plant is a very attractive proposition, especially if it’s going to be a permanent job that allows them to have a wage they can show to the bank and get access to homeownership at one point.

Shaun: It sounds like when you have a young person who’s coming up, they’re going into trade school, they’re learning skills, and then the dream job would be to do exactly what you suggest, which is permanent, full-time work with benefits. You’re doing all the things that you would do on the site, but in a controlled environment with more guaranteed work over a longer period of time. Less inconsistency, less uncertainty. That sounds incredibly attractive.

Now, I guess prefab has been around for a long time, but what you’re suggesting in terms of how it can impact the productivity of Canada, when I hear productivity, that goes to the national economy as well. All that we’re trying to do as a nation to protect ourselves from all the vulnerabilities around tariffs and whatnot, we want to be a stronger country. It sounds like prefab and housing can be a pathway towards that strengthening of our nation. Not just about, “Oh, we’re going to build more houses,” but it trickles down. Is that fair to say?

Gaetan: From a business perspective, we’re looking at– as I indicated earlier, there’s an enormous amount of demand for housing. Our company has got a short-term target of 2,500 housing units per year. Eventually, with our second plant, it’s going to be 20,000 units per year. That’s a big number, but it would be only 10% of today’s market, which is we build about 220,000, 225,000 homes a year in Canada. The target to get ahead of this housing crisis, we have to increase that capacity to 500,000 per year.

Let’s imagine a world where we’ve been totally successful. There’s a lot more modular house builders that are producing homes, and we get ahead of this housing crisis. Let’s look at the exports. We have clients today in Mexico where we haven’t delivered yet, but we’re going to be delivering housing to Mexico. When we’re done building Canada, we’re going to turn to the rest of the world. We have connections in Australia, and we’re nurturing these connections with the view that at one point, we’re going to be exporting either the technology or exporting houses to those countries.

Shaun: That’s amazing. If we can just dig down a little bit into the financials of things, how does prefab and modular, how does it help homeowners save money?

Gaetan: We’re looking at– there’s a lot of communities where fourplexes are allowed now on single-family homes. The law has changed in BC by the province to allow that. I know in Ontario, there’s a number of single-family areas that are now allowing fourplexes. Families that want to take advantage of that to basically build additional housing in the backyard or to replace their single-family home with a larger triplex or fourplex, we offer a product that’s going to be facilitating that.

Again, it’s going to be the same thing. Instead of the homeowner having to deal with an army of subcontractors, they’re going to get utilities and foundations built. After that, we just come in and deliver a home and assemble it on that property. We’re going to deliver the services in 3D boxes, the condo core. Then the rest of the walls are going to be taken off a truck, craned into place, and attached. Within a couple of months instead of a year and a half or two years, people are going to have access to that housing unit to put it on market for rentals or for grandma to move in.

I’ll give you a number or a couple of numbers that are coming from that independent report I talked about. This is a professional cost consulting company. They looked at our drawings for an actual project in Gibsons and compared it to traditional construction. The savings for the construction was $9 million on a six-story building. That makes a whole lot of difference. This is a rental building. We’re going to be able to rent those units for less than our competitors. You talked about time is money. When you talk about time, if you buy a piece of land, there’s holding costs, insurance.

Insurance on vacant land is very expensive. There’s taxes, and then there’s interest that you pay. For that project, they established that amount, the savings, at $3 million just because we’re going to be much quicker to build. Those are significant numbers, and they make the difference between a developer today. There’s projects that get canceled because they don’t pencil in. The performers are not working out. It makes a difference between go and no-go for certain projects. $9 million plus $3 million is $12 million. That’s extremely big numbers. As I said, these are not my numbers. They’re independent cost consultants.

Shaun: My follow-up question to that was going to be what’s in it for builders. There it is, right? Major savings from a time perspective. Developers get to have their units on the market sooner. I’ve been hearing these stories lately online and listening to the radio, listening to other podcasts about housing and how there is this– You’ve got all these foreign countries maybe coming in and buying up all these units, or they want to develop something. They presale a lot of these units. Then by the time it gets three to five years down the road and the people are going to move in, but life has changed so much, it’s hard to navigate the costs of those things. I see that being upside positive. for everybody across the board.

Gaetan: Yes. It’s not all rosy. There’s one flaw in this whole pattern which the lenders, the financing industry has to catch up to, which is the fact that if you do something off-site, you buy modular to build a building, the lenders, the people, the banks, and CMHC will not provide funding until the material is bolted down onsite. If you–

Shaun: Oh, wait. Stop right there. Stop right there, Gaetan. I’m just trying to follow. You’re saying I’m a purchaser. I’m a home buyer. Let’s say we’ll use the fourplex as an example. I need to get a mortgage on that fourplex, but you’re saying they won’t activate that money until it’s actually bolted onto the site?

Gaetan: That’s correct. We are people in the industry. My company was part of a letter that was written by about 200 signatories from the construction industry saying we need change. We need the finance world to catch up to modular and to understand how this works because that homeowner who’s trying to build a fourplex, they have a certain amount of money that they would roll over. They spend $100,000. They get $100,000 back from the bank. The next $100,000, they get it from the bank. It allows them to get funding and finance as the building is going up.

If it’s modular, they’re going to have to pay 40% of the entire house as a deposit for the company to start buying all the materials and putting the labor to assemble this, and it comes in one big lump. Instead of $100,000, now it’s $1 million that they have to finance themselves. That’s why there has to be some changes. The real estate industry, which has an interest in advancing those kinds of investments by their clients, basically, those units, some of them are going to be for sale. The real estate industry has really got to advocate for changes to be adopted by all these lenders to facilitate the construction, the use of modular.

Shaun: Paint that picture. What is the change that needs to happen? Could it turbocharge these things happening much faster? What is that change look like?

Gaetan: I think it’s a combination of advocacy, educating people in understanding how this works. The industry itself, the modular industry, has to create some track record to show, “Yes, when we get the deposit, we’re going to deliver on that,” and companies are going to gain that credibility with lenders, hopefully, but it’s a combination of changes that need to take place. CMHC, the Canadian Mortgage Housing Corporation, has to lead the charge and change the rules in that regard.

Shaun: There are some restrictions to how things can get financed. That sounds like legislatively or regulatory changes could happen that would help a great deal. Is that right?

Gaetan: Yes. Certainly, it should be part of the changes that are going to be the– One thing is not going to solve the housing crisis. There’s a lot of things that need to happen. Modular is going to help, but modular financing, how it’s financed to allow lending for things that are not on-site yet that are being built off-site, lending money for that is an important change.

Shaun: It feels like, obviously, our government has to be a part of that supportive system. I know that you had spoken in front of the House of Commons regarding the advancement of these building technologies. Tell me a little bit about that. What was that like, and did you feel it was well-received?

Gaetan: I think it was extremely well-received. That experience was enlightening. Those committees are– all the different parties are listening. It was an engaging conversation. I did promote modular and did promote some aspects of the things that need to change. We certainly saw that reflected. There’s a real consensus about support that’s required for accelerating the pace of construction, bringing more technology in construction, and changing the way we build housing.

Shaun: Massive is not the only shop in town. There’s other leaders that are trying to push this forward. I feel like Massive is obviously the best. There’s nobody better. I’m just saying it’s got to be one of those things where, across the entire industry, it has to get traction. Because when I think of prefab homes and modular homes, there’s a bit of a stigmatization with it. It’s like small houses all look the same, all boring. There might be that perception of potential home buyers. How can that misconception be dealt with? How do you deal with that in terms of its image of what it is, prefab homes, what they are?

Gaetan: Yes. When I talk to folks, sometimes they bring back some of these stigma, these issues. It’s not going to look all the same inside. It’s not going to look all the same outside. On the inside, we don’t finish the floor, and the flooring is done onsite. We don’t finish that in the factory. That’s going to allow us to have a seamless floor, seamless ceiling, so that everything is looking normal. There’s not going to be pieces that look like it’s two halves of the building. Similarly, outside, we’re not going to be doing our siding. We’re installing the siding, the last step on the exterior. We’re doing this onsite.

That means instead of having something that looks like boxes side by side, the siding is going to be basically providing a seamless facade. We’re giving architects the full flexibility of using whatever material they wish on the outside of the building. Similarly, the architects and interior decorators can select different materials for the cabinet doors, the type of taps. All of these things are flexible and will lead to consumer, basically, taste. A rental building is going to have sturdier, perhaps more durable materials utilized, and maybe less expensive countertops. If we do a condo or luxury condo, then they can have marble countertops. We have some flexibility.

Where we save money is in the hard things, which is the plumbing wall. Those are going to be all the same. We’ve designed once, and we’re going to make thousands of those plumbing walls. That’s where we’re going to save a great deal of money.

Shaun: I think that’s what people want. It sounds like in this model moving forward, you want to still be able to customize. You want to give the colors and the touches and the fabrics and the countertops and the looks of certain things. That can all be done with this model, but it’s the stuff that I do not want to see. I was just in Newfoundland and my little house that’s 120 years old. Every summer, I go home and guess what? The pipes are burst. Half of the pipes are copper. The rest are PEX. I’m trying to think. Now, this is the one time where behind a wall, I had to go in and I had to bust down a little cabinet area and get in there and I had to replace the copper with the PEX, but none of it was insulated. I didn’t know where anything was. What you’re saying is with this system that you have moving forward, you know exactly what’s there and it’s all done properly. That’s stuff I don’t want to deal with. I can see this being massive savings, massive flexibility, so much opportunity here.

Gaetan: Yes. I told you, I’ve been in construction for a long time. On a six-story building, there’s one day at one point where the owner turns on the water and then they start praying.

Shaun: Oh, yes, exactly. Exactly.

Gaetan: Then there’s– our units are going to be, before they leave the factory, the water system is capped and then put under pressure. Similarly, the sanitary, all the system is capped, ready to be connected on site to the other units, but that’s tested under pressure. We know that when the tap is turned on at the building, it’s not going to leak. Similarly, we test our electrical system and so on. I think those kinds of quality assurance matters are really important and they’re going to make a difference.

Shaun: Oh my gosh. It makes so much sense. Duh, again. Before I let you go, Gaetan, this is such an amazing conversation today. I think it’s incredibly enlightening to see what the potential can be. It’s not only potential, but it’s actually happening right now. What are the things that has to happen? Tell me the things that need to happen for this to really go to the next gear. What are the things that are in the way? What are the barriers? What needs to happen for us to really take this to the next level?

Gaetan: I think every member of the industry and certainly the Canadian Real Estate Association is playing a role in this with this podcast. The construction industry is 13% of the economy. It’s a huge part of our economy. Modular is one important solution. There’s other technology that’s being considered. I think the industry needs to be part of informing themselves and informing the people who are making these individual decisions what’s going to happen in all these initiatives to streamline project approvals by municipalities and then to open up the possibility of building triplexes and fourplex.

This is going to lead to a whole bunch of individual decisions where the couple sits at the dining room table and they look at the options of what to do. Do we sell the house? Do we put the laneway home in the back? They need to be informed, those folks, to look at more options. I think the real estate industry is doing exactly what it should do, which is to learn about more options and then inform consumers of what they should be looking at.

Obviously, I want modular to be one of those things that is widely known, and the utilization of mass timber. We were talking in my shop yesterday about tilt-up mass timber. There’s a building that’s gone up. Tilt-up mass timber is those large panels that are going to be put to create the building. That would replace tilt-up concrete, which has been used for many years. Each panel of tilt-up concrete takes a week to basically form, pour, and then lift up and let it cure and so on. There’s a building where all the panels were CLT and they were built in a week. Same time to build the entire building as it takes to build one tilt-up concrete panel.

Shaun: Wow.

Gaetan: That blew me away when I learned those numbers. I think those are the kinds of efficiencies that if we utilize the newest technology for engineered wood, we’re going to save money, we’re going to help save the environment, we’re going to utilize something that has absorbed carbon out of the air instead of consuming carbon, and we’re going to end up with equipping ourselves with the ability to compete with the rest of the world to be the best in the world in terms of delivering housing.

Shaun: Yes, Gaetan, that gets me so stoked. I’m so excited about that. That’s amazing, but we got to deliver. I think the time is now, and I can see why Macleans picked you to be on the Power List of 2024. Congratulations on that, by the way, and what an honor it is to talk to you and to hear all about what you do now and what the future for Canada looks like in terms of modular. I think we got to keep spreading the word, and it just makes absolute sense. It’s just common sense. It just makes sense.

You can’t really be divided about how the best way is if it means that it’s going to be cheaper, better for the environment, it’s going to happen faster, and it’s going to activate our economy to such a level that it puts us in the forefront in the world. Thank you so much for taking the time today, Gaetan. What a pleasure.

Gaetan: Thank you, Shaun. It was a great conversation. You bring so much energy to these interviews. I recommend your podcast to everybody I know.

Shaun: Oh, awesome. Well, thank you so much. Good luck with everything. Where are you headed today? What’s next on your agenda just today?

Gaetan: Next is we’re meeting with the trade commissioner from the Canadian embassy in Beijing, China. We’re procuring a lot of materials that are not manufactured in Canada that are manufactured in China, so there’s a lot of trade exchange that’s taking place.

Shaun: Got you. Well, good luck. Good luck, and thank you again, Gaetan. All the best. Great meeting you.

Gaetan: Thank you so much, Shaun. Bye-bye.

Shaun: The housing crisis is not going to be solved by one simple thing. However, after today’s conversation, prefab and modular housing could definitely go a long way. I had no idea. When you really nail it down, when you start talking about the amount of time it’s going to save, the amount of money it’s going to save, the environment, the waste, all of it, it just seems like, duh. Thanks so much to Gaetan Royer for his amazing inspiration, and I wish him all the best. Other companies who are doing it as well, keep it going.

Guys, if you enjoyed today’s episode, please go like, subscribe, wherever you get your podcasts. The podcast today is brought to you by Canadian Real Estate Association, CREA. Production brought to you by Alphabet® Creative. My name is Shaun Majumder. Thanks for joining us on REAL TIME. We’ll see you next time on REAL TIME.