Take a tour of the house that can be built in a week – Stuff.co.nz

Could modular, pre-fabricated homes be the answer toNew Zealand's housing shortage?

Nautilus Modular'shome that can be builtin a week debutedthis week, sparking several hundred inquiries from potential buyers over 24 hours.

General manager Jason Watkins said the interest had been "extraordinary".

The company had been contacted by families looking for their first home,product designers and large-scale developers and was already having discussions with "a number of parties", he said.

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Founder Peter Marshall hoped the products would get the support of Kiwis who werestruggling to find affordable, comfortable homes.

The prefabricated, standardised modules are not limited to residential dwellings but could also be used asschool rooms, hiking huts and commercial buildings.

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A peek inside a Nautilus Modular home.

But it's not clear yet how much of a disruption - if any - they couldcreate in the stretched construction sector.

Principal economist at theNew Zealand Institute of Economic Research Eilya Torshizian said modular homes offered a valuable addition to the property market.

"It's providing choices and helping people to construct in a short timeframe. At a larger scale we still don't know what are the preferences of New Zealandhouseholds for modular building," he said.

Nautilus Modular

These pavilion-style homes can be installed in less than a week.

Kiwis might enjoy the option to customise the design, but larger-scale developments using modular homes would probably resultin them looking very similar.

Wider constraints in the sector - the lengthy building consent process, supply chain issues, the size of the market - might not be solved by the introduction of modular homes, he said.

But New Zealand could learn from other countries that had already adopted the modular construction method. They were widely used in Scandinavia, Torshizian said.

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Peter Marshall, founder of Nautilus Modular, hopes to establish factories across the country to build his modular, prefabricated homes.

"I personally have some doubts about how materialthe role of modular systems in the construction process in New Zealand will be in comparison to other constraints."

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