Gary McLuskey Managing Director of Global Design at Greystar shares his viewpoint from our Housing Londoners report, exploring the importance of modular construction.

We have 30 years of experience of investing, developing, and operating a range of residential rental products across the globe including student, young professional and traditional multifamily housing. We were an early adopter of volumetric modular construction in the UK and have since exported the technology to the US setting up our own modular housing factory in Pennsylvania with a focus on delivering affordability at scale, while improving quality, sustainability, and the speed of delivery.

Modern methods of construction will be part of the answer to the UK’s housing crisis, with volumetric construction being up to 60 per cent quicker than traditional construction. We focus on three key areas — design, approvals, and construction — to improve the speed and quality of the much-needed rental homes we deliver.

We design successful communities by focusing on resident experience. At times, the desire of residents does not fully align with policy convention, so we work hard with local authorities to navigate design and planning policy that has generally evolved to guide ‘for sale’ and/or social housing. We negotiated several policy points with the GLA when designing Greenford Quay by referencing historic precedent and our extensive resident feedback research.

A good example of this is rather than following guidance that would have led to multiple entrances, we always focus on the arrival at the building in a larger primary entrance. This allows our residents to gain valuable facetime with their onsite community team in addition to improving security. 

In the UK, to accelerate the speed of homes to market, we have partnered with Tide Construction and Vision Modular Systems to utilise modular construction on a number of student and multifamily projects with almost 2,500 homes already in operation. We work with emerging technologies to deliver sustainable solutions, better design, and reduce delivery times by 50 per cent.

Greenford Quay, our multifamily community in Ealing, is one of the UK’s largest build-to-rent schemes and will comprise 2,118 homes (30 per cent of which are affordable) when it is finished. In total, over 60 per cent of those homes will be delivered utilising volumetric modular construction. The development also includes 20,000sqm of retail and office space as well as a primary school, health centre and 3.1 hectares of outdoor public spaces. The construction duration for our first building at Tillerman’s Court was 21 months, significantly faster than it would have taken using traditional methods.

At our core, we create good urban architecture and consider modular construction a technique and not an aesthetic. Our modules at Greenford are delivered to site and then clad in brick on site to avoid any obvious module joints — just because its modular does not mean the architecture needs looks different or it needs to alter resident experience.

As well as speeding up the process, modular construction also allows for earlier cost certainty, design consistency and higher levels of safety and quality control. With less time spent on site, noise and disruption for our neighbours is kept to a minimum. As a vertically integrated business, this allows us to maintain a good relationship with neighbours of the site, as the business moves into the role of operator.