According to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, Canada will need nearly 3.5 million additional new homes by 2030, and many believe that prefab homes are a fast and efficient way to reach this number faster, but the road to making prefab buildings is full of challenges.

Why is it difficult to implement prefab buildings in Canada?

Beige said one of the factors making it difficult to implement prefab housing on a wide scale is modifications to the homes, as individual modifications to prefab designs often add months to the construction process, instead of consumers choosing a pre-approved design and sticking to it.

Beige explained that the manufacturing process becomes complicated “when

a client comes and says: I love this model, but I want to make all these changes.”

He pointed out that making modifications and obtaining new permits can significantly increase construction time.

Both Pearson and Beige agreed that the federal government's move to revive the wartime housing strategy for pre-approved catalogs could help boost the efficiency of prefab housing construction.

When thousands of veterans returned to Canada after World War II, Canada was facing a housing crisis, and to bypass bureaucracy and speed up the construction and approval process, the government issued a catalog of pre-approved home designs that builders could start constructing immediately, and hundreds of thousands of new homes were built in Canada within a short period of time.

He said, "We receive thousands of inquiries monthly on the website about our model homes, and prefab or modular construction is a way of building where the majority of the construction takes place off-site, often in a facility, like a factory, and then either a fully constructed model home or parts of the home are shipped to the site, where it is assembled and connected to utilities." Pearson likened it to buying a complete car in parts and then the mechanic assembling it in your garage.

Jesse Beige from the custom home building company in Ontario said: "There is growing interest in prefab homes."

According to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, Canada will need nearly 3.5 million additional new homes by 2030, and many believe that prefab homes are a fast and efficient way to reach this number faster, but the road to making prefab buildings is full of challenges.