B.C. releases standardized designs in effort to build homes faster, cheaper

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The provincial government has unveiled a catalogue of 10 standardized home designs to help lower the cost of building small-scale, multi-unit housing.

Developers and home builders can take the designs, which are available for free online, and use them like building blocks, stacking and rearranging outlines for a base, one or two upper floors and a roof.

There are seven different concepts for small-scale, multi-unit homes and three sketches for laneway homes.

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One longtime builder of these said the success of this new catalogue will depend on how municipalities embrace it to expedite permits and whether B.C. is open to the building industry expanding its offerings.

“At first blush, it’s pretty cool,” said Jake Fry, CEO of Smallworks Ltd., which has been specializing in laneway and small homes since 2005.

Fry said the hope is that municipalities, which have the authority to approve what gets built, will use the designs to cut down the amount of time it’s taking to start construction.

“The designs still have to go in front of somebody, who (says), ‘Oh, this is from the catalogue. Here’s your permit,’” said Fry.

He said if a builder sets out to construct 20 small homes and knows that a permit can be secured right away, the company can better plan how it buys parts and reduce holding costs.

“You can go out and buy 20 furnaces or 20 toilets. The procurement becomes lower cost and we can offer that to the client and be competitive in our pricing because we are shopping wisely as opposed to every job being a new science project.”

The catalogue, released Wednesday, allows companies that make prefabricated parts, such as panels or windows, to observe which designs sell because they’ve been repeatedly approved for use across multiple municipalities, said Fry.

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At the press conference, Chris Hill, president of BCollective Homes, said this enables a systemized approach for making prefab elements in larger volumes.

“The first standard home project will be like every other home but, with repetition, the entire supply chain will become more efficient, leading to reduced costs and faster, more affordable delivery of homes,” said Hill in a statement.

Fry added that while the catalogue could have been “more sophisticated” and have more options, this will evolve.

“It’s perhaps like setting a table with the ingredients and letting someone else make the meal. There are basic shapes and alternative shapes. It’s enough to start.”

At a press conference, Housing Minister Kahlon mentioned a story published by Postmedia in May 2018 about longtime homeowners in Delta who turned their single-family, suburban lot, where they had raised their family in a 1970s rancher, into two new duplexes that had four units.

In 2016, the City of Delta gave Kathleen and John Higgins a green light to start the project. But the city also said each application for any future similar projects would have to be reviewed individually for context.

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Kahlon said these standardized designs are intended to make it easier for more homeowners to replicate the Higgins’ redevelopment.

The ministry of housing said no local governments have adopted the plans yet as the designs were only recently finalized.

However, the province has been in touch with some local governments that have shown some early interest and is working to identify which ones might be interested in a pilot project to expedite approvals for designs from the catalogue.

A few B.C. municipalities have already been using pre-approved home designs to expedite building and lower costs with some, like Kelowna, holding design competitions to refresh offerings.

The Regional District of North Okanagan has a list of 13 approved designs and charges $1,000 for a set of printed plans, a PDF and a faster application process. Its catalogue offers designs for one- and two-storey, as well as one- and two-bedroom homes. Nelson sells three different “pre-reviewed laneway house plans” available for $1,000 each. The City of Quesnel offers five pre-reviewed plans for laneway homes for no charge.

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