Our hotel sector has struggled to deliver brand-new properties in the past five years, as rising construction costs have made it difficult for new hotel developments to ''stack up'' in terms of viability. This is despite room shortages being reported in most capital cities. However, this is set to change, with modular construction methods enabling high-quality, faster and cheaper construction of new properties.
Australia has been relatively slow to take to modular construction compared to other countries. However, there has been a marked move in the past few years to embrace it across diverse property asset types.
There have been negative perceptions of modular construction in Australia for several reasons including perceived limited service lifespan, design limitations and property valuations along with risk associated with overseas procurement of modules, industrial relations implications, design stigma and limited local industry experience.
However, there are many benefits to modular, prefabricated construction, including faster delivery, cost savings, greater quality control and improved safety on site.
A tipping point has occurred in the construction industry where the benefits of modular project delivery have outweighed the constraints. The methods have also been used in new developments across many sectors and have proved successful.
We initially used modular methods for limited purposes, such as site offices on construction sites. But prefabricated construction has since been successfully used in medium-density residential developments, high-volume housing for the mining sector and the development of public buildings and social infrastructure such as hospitals, hotels, aged care facilities and schools.
It has also proved critical in meeting significant accommodation demands in remote mining towns in Queensland and Western Australia, where conventional construction techniques are unable to be employed based on exhaustive demand, tight time frames and prohibitive costs.
Following this success in other sectors, Australian hotel owners and developers are only now seriously contemplating complete modular construction forms.
Previous uses of modular construction in our hotel sector have been limited to small components of budget hotel chains. In the mid-1990s Accor used prefabricated bathrooms in its economy hotel chains Formule 1 and Ibis based on industrialized construction techniques that were tried and tested during its earlier similar brand rollouts in France.
Europe has excellent examples of high-end hotels constructed using modular techniques. These create a pathway for how the Australian hotel industry could embark on a construction revolution resulting in desperately needed new hotel stock.
Drenka Andjelic (author) is the managing director of Construction Assignments.
This story was found via the Sydney Morning Herald at: http://www.smh.com.au/business/property/modular-hotels-can-stack-up-20120824-24rqf.html
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